Hear No Evil

Deep Thoughts: About New Beck, Old Wars, John Prine And How To Give A Dirty Santorum

2006-10-10T18:44:00.000-07:00

As a boy I wanted to be Sherlock Holmes when I grew up, but now I’m thinking I wanna be Nigel Godrich. Seriously, the “it” boy producer’s life is most people’s idea of a rock ’n’ roll fantasy camp. Just take a look at his day planner for the last couple of years. Monday: Give Paul McCartney edge. Tuesday: Dial back Thom Yorke’s edge. Wednesday: Make Beck a man.

Ironically, it’s the latter who suffers the greatest cred deficit these days. Some say Beck jumped the shark back at Midnite Vultures. Others lost faith when they found out he was a member of the same outer space cult as Tom Cruise.

But The Information, Beck’s latest, renders all that moot. Think Paul’s Boutique meets The White Album — a sprawling, mesmerizing amalgam of dots nobody else would’ve thought to connect. I hear bits of Neu!, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Serge Gainsbourg’s proto-rap masterwork “Requiem Pour Un Con” and even old Beck, all filtered through the most modern of sound filters and down digital trapdoors where they bounce around endlessly in the pomo hall of mirrors that is Beck’ Hanson's soul, or at the very least an incredible simulation of one. The results are as arresting and ambitious as anything he’s released to date.

Only time will tell if this goes in one ear and out the other a month after purchase, never to be returned to the CD changer, as was the case with Guero. But this much is already clear: Beck would give his left testicle, and the vintage Adidas shell-toe (also left) he keeps it in, to write a song as timeless and indelible as John Prine’s ode to “Sam Stone,” which maps a Vietnam vet’s postwar descent into the abyss, from blind patriotism to PTSD to heroin. (I know this because, well, I just know these things, but also because Beck takes a weak stab at addressing war in a shoulda-been-left-off song called “Soldier Jane.”)

People have been trying to get me into Prine for years, but he always struck me as one of those things that was “good for you” but didn’t taste good—like broccoli or condoms. But last week NPR’s American Routes devoted a whole show to the man, and you know what? All of a sudden I’m likin’ the taste of broccoli and condoms.

You’ve heard “Sam Stone” even if the title doesn’t ring a bell. It’s the song that goes, “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes/ Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose.”

Which got me to thinking: When the Vietnam vets came home, they became victims. When the Iraq War vets came home, they became activists—running for office as Democrats or starting anti-Swift Boater 527s like VoteVets.org.

This is progress.

VoteVets is a group of Iraq vets delivering karmic comeuppance to war-pig GOP congressmen who talk the war-on-terror talk out of one side of their mouth and vote to kill funding for state-of-the-art body armor out of the other. VoteVets has a devastatingly effective TV ad demonstrating the difference between the Vietnam-era flak vest issued to our boys in Baghdad, which modern arms turn to swiss cheese, and the latest body armor that stops bullets dead—before they kill and maim. The ad ends with an Iraq War vet explaining [insert name of war-pig congressman here] voted against funding modern body armor.

Last week VoteVets.org took the fight to Pennsylvania, targeting our pal Rick Santorum, another cynical chickenhawk who voted to sell out the troops under cover of Senatorial procedural bullshit. Pardon my French, but fuck. These. People. All together now, let us sing: There’s a hole in the nation’s arm where all the money goes, and our boys in Baghdad are dying a death of a thousand tax cuts, I suppose.

Gitmo Jukebox

2006-10-10T17:42:00.000-07:00

Just Like War, Torture Is Over If You Want It

Like STDs or race relations, torture is the great unspeakable. Nobody will talk about it. Not your friends or your family, not your congressman or Fox News and certainly not our president. He won’t even use the T-word—he calls it “alternative interrogation” like it’s something you’d see on the midway at Lollapalooza. Well, you can call rape “a forced backrub with benefits,” but it’s still rape.

Perhaps the least heinous of all reported U.S. torture techniques was the blasting of Eminem and Dr. Dre at teeth-rattling volume into the virgin ears of hog-tied Muslim detainees—for 20 days at a time in midnight-dark dungeons.

There’s a company called BMI that, among other things, tracks how many times artists get played on the radio, in bars or even by cover bands. Those radio stations and nightclubs have to pay BMI a performance royalty—it’s a small fee for each play, literally nickels and dimes—but with big artists it really adds up. BMI is a stickler for enforcing the rules. If your corner bar doesn’t pay up, the plug gets pulled on the jukebox. I’ve seen it happen.

So, I called up BMI to make sure what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. I told them about the Human Rights Watch report documenting the Slim Shady treatment and asked if the government is paying out performance royalties for these marathon S&M listening parties. After all, 20 days in a row adds up to a lot of Benjamins for Dre and Em when you consider there are hundreds of terror detainees, some as young as 15 at the time of incarceration. And if the feds aren’t paying up, is BMI gonna pull the plug on the Kabul jukebox or what?

I get a call back from BMI’s spokesperson Robbin Ahrold. Like all spokespeople, he’s a most agreeable fellow, adept at reinforcing the illusion that he’s helping you even when he’s stonewalling.

“Well, to be honest, we’ve never been asked a question like this. I’m not sure how to even find the answer,” he says, sounding sincere. He assures me he’ll get back to me before deadline because, hey, he’s kinda curious about this himself.Turns out “kinda curious” is BMI-speak for “not so much.” He doesn’t get back to me.

I try the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the folks who jealously guard the retail integrity and profit potential of major label music—even if that means suing moms and kids for piracy. I get the RIAA’s spokesperson Amanda Hunter and give her my spiel. Well, as you can imagine, it went over like a fart in church. She’ll have to get back to me, she says. An hour later she emails:

“The RIAA doesn’t have a role in the collection and distribution of royalties, so no one here has any knowledge of when royalties are collected or distributed. We are a trade association, based in D.C., and we handle antipiracy, legislative activity and litigation.”

Not to be dissuaded, I write back:

“I’m not so sure this isn’t a piracy issue. I mean, I haven’t seen any receipts. Have you folks? How do we know that the Eminem and Dr. Dre tracks in question weren’t illegally downloaded by some GI?”

Apparently tired of playing along, she writes back:

“We are not connected to this story in any way. Good luck, Amanda.”

I’m sorry Amanda, but you’re wrong. We’re all connected to this story. That’s the horrible point I’m trying to make. When America tortures people, you torture people. So, in the words of the bard, how does it feel, Amanda?

Mystery Tramps

2006-09-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

New Morning For Dylan Or I Hate Paris In The Fall

Hi, kids. Welcome back! You can leave your summer book reports on The Stranger and the cruel meaninglessness of existence so-why-even-bother? -- in 800 words or less -- on my desk after class. And be forewarned, anyone still pronouncing the author’s name like “anus” is simply not going to pass this class.

On a happier note, I have a fun assignment for you today: Compare and contrast the new Bob Dylan album Modern Times with the new Paris Hilton album, which is called … wait for it … Paris.

Why all those frowns? What’s that, you say? Dylan is old and in the way and smells like Vincent Price and sounds like cancer? You poor babies—what a small pillow you have to dream on. Here, I’ll get us started.

Hip irony would almost certainly dictate that we champion Paris over Dylan—that we find something au courant and zeitgeist-defining in her puddle-deep shallowness and that, conversely, we somehow find something passe and antiquated in Dylan’s depth.

Well, fuck hip irony. Sure, it’s never been hard to dismiss the cult of Dylan as a geeky sausage-party circle- jerk for overread fiftysomethings who just can’t admit it’s o-v-e-r, but at least he has a cult. I’m not sure Paris Hilton even has a fan base outside the stalkerazzi that devour her as omnivorously as they once devoured Dylan.

As Dorothy Parker once said, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people he gives it to.” Maybe that’ll be Paris' great contribution to humanity—a redeeming act that’ll explain to future generations why we ever gave a shit—and close out the long overdue tab on her 15 minutes. She’ll be remembered as the once-living proof that money can’t buy everything.

Anyone expecting Paris to be anything more than a six-figure karaoke party we get to overhear from the wrong side of the velvet rope will be sorely disappointed. Hilton wanted to be a pop star because, best she can tell, it’s one more thing her money can buy. Dylan taught himself to sing for his supper, because otherwise it was just one more thing he couldn’t buy. With a voice like his, most other people would have gone hungry.

Paris' Capri-thin pipes have been fattened like foie gras and given the finest airbrushing money can buy—double-tracked, pitch-corrected and laid into the mix at flattering angles in the same way right-swept bangs can distract from a problem nose. Like her “hot” couture wardrobe, the songs have all been bought from the biggest design houses for her to try on, accessorize and be seen in. Does this reggae jawn make my ass look big? I am so hot in this Rod Stewart song!

Dylan too spent a lot of time on his vocals on Modern Times, finding surprising reserves of emotion and expressiveness in that smoke-wrecked instrument. Unlike Hilton, Dylan got his songs the old-fashioned way—he earned them.

Busy being born, busy dying and now busy being reborn. He’s seen it all at least twice. Those lines in his face? There are entire novels in each and every one—which is why Modern Times will fit comfortably next to Love and Theft and Time out of Mind on the library shelf where they stock uncommonly good late-period trilogies by American masters.

Already Paris is fading, like an old newspaper, to be remembered, if at all, for it's bottle-blonde ambition, bikini-waxed soul and for setting back the cause of cluelessness at least 20 years—just when it was beginning to make some real strides.

Salty Dogs: M. Ward And The Pirates Of Doom

2006-09-06T23:50:00.000-07:00

Blood, Sweat And Come: Folk Music Takes No Prisoners

Illustration by Alex Fine

Folk music gets a bad rap, having long ago been relegated to the leafy retreats of crunchy granola ninnies in white socks and Birkenstocks, where its rough-hewn hymnals were gutted by time and the ’60s, and reduced to politically correct acoustica, liberal bromides and impotent protest. What’s missing from most people’s assumptions about folk music is the blood, sweat and come, not to mention the staggering body counts, laments for lost limbs, dead wives, drowned babies and hard rains. And that's just the happy songs.

Velveteen folk-rocker M. Ward is self-schooled in all things past, and smart enough to know those who ignore history are doomed to remix it. A sad-eyed troubadour in the hang-dawg tradition of Nick Drake and Tim Buckley, Ward teases high emotion out of low-key compositions, coloring his records with the sepia-toned crackle and hiss of old rural blues recordings, drifty dustbowl sadness and the submarine murk of vintage echo.

He’s an exceedingly dexterous fingerstyle guitarist and an alchemical interpreter able to transmute shit into gold—check out his transformation of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” from big-’80s pomp to dreamy folkadelia on 2003’s Transfiguration of Vincent.

As a songwriter, Ward spreads his wings wider with every outing, but until now his compositions have yet to transcend sensibility. They’re all vibe and swoon—arresting in the moment, but oddly forgettable beyond the bewitching atmospherics. Ward’s yet to write anything that would be half as special in the hands of another artist who didn’t share his rich old-soul vocal timbre or knack for reverb.

No matter. Sometimes beauty is its own reward. Ward’s fourth LP—in addition to curating last year’s I Am the Resurrection: A Tribute to John Fahey or producing Jenny Lewis With the Watson Twins’ Rabbit Fur Coat—the wishfully titled Post-War, drops this week. It’s pretty, twittering music you usually have to see stars and little birdies to hear. This is the sound of 21st-century porch music, like a Woody Guthrie song about flying saucers or watching an old flickering silent movie on your iPod.

The darkest corner of folk is arguably the pirate song, the wheezing besotted sea chanteys barked by brutal men in cruel circumstance. Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has revived popular interest in the swashbuckling exploits of the OGs of the seven seas.

Enter Hal Willner, a Philadelphia native and musical coordinator of Saturday Night Live since 1981. Willner has made a career of corralling high-cred contemporary talent to reanimate old, weird musics in ambitiously themed tribute albums. For the pirate-themed Rogue’s Gallery, Willner assembled an impressive roster of A-list Jolly Rogers—Bono, Lou Reed, Lucinda Williams, a surprisingly nonannoying Sting—along with semiregular cast of not-ready-for-prime-time players such as Van Dyke Parks, Nick Cave, Mary Margaret O’Hara and Kate McGarrigle (along with Loudon and Rufus Wainwright).

Lending an air of unpredictability to a 43-song double disc are wild cards such as Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, the actor John C. Reilly and Hunter S. Thompson illustrator (and no stranger to high-seas decadence) Ralph Steadman. The resulting Rogue’s Gallery is a sprawling, artsy song cycle, as unpredictable as a raging noreaster, weirder than 15 men on a dead man’s chest, with a heaping helping of rum, sodomy and the lash.

Dead Flowers: Syd, Arthur & The Acid-Minded Professor

2006-09-06T19:58:00.000-07:00

Chalk it up to karmic coincidence that the deaths of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and Love’s Arthur Lee—two of ’60s psychedelia’s most beloved and drug-damaged souls—should bookend the recent publication of Robert Greenfield’s Timothy Leary: A Biography.

Though Leary has been dead 10 years, Greenfield wakes his trippy ghost and, à la A Christmas Carol, forces it to confront the damning facts of his past: his reckless acid-for-all advocacy (Leary never really bothered to point out that, um, maybe children and the mentally unstable should not take LSD); his snake-oil charm and countercultural carpetbagging (from stoner Harvard prof to gun-toting revolutionary in just 10 years!); and the shameful neglect of his children (he died estranged from his son; his equally estranged daughter killed herself in 1990 while facing attempted murder charges).

In fairness to Leary and other neural cosmonauts of the early ’60s, they were venturing into uncharted waters, often navigating under the influence of one of the most powerful drugs known to man.

His mistakes, in many ways, formed the cultural learning curve of drug-taking. Because there was always someone there to clean up his messes—lotus-eating heiresses, a string of soon-to-be ex-wives literally tripping their tits off—he never had to accept responsibility or even learn from them. Which may explain why he never seemed to grasp what was painfully obvious to even the most sympathetic observer of the drug scene: Some people simply should never, ever trip.

Syd Barrett, who died last month from diabetic complications, was one of those people. The van Gogh of early rock music, Barrett cut off his mind to spite his face, still swallowing acid by the handful even as his increasingly deranged behavior dislocated him from his bandmates and, for that matter, everybody else back on planet Earth.

Most of his genius escaped recording, though it did beam directly into the illuminated skulls of the Britpop vanguard, frugging stoned and immaculate at London underground clubs like the UFO where Barrett worked out early Floyd’s deathless outer-space-blues-Hobbit-hole-folk-trot.

By the time Floyd’s debut The Piper at the Gates of Dawn came out in 1967, Barrett’s wick was already burnt. By the beginning of 1968 he’d been fired by his own band. There were a couple of hard-to-listen-to but unforgettable solo records, painstakingly pieced together by his former bandmates from the intermittent moments of lucidity and focus they could get out of Barrett by that point. The Madcap Laughs and Barrett still sound as haunted and frayed as the man who mused aloud in his last song for Pink Floyd, “I’m wondering who could be writing this song.” After that he retired to his mother’s basement in Cambridge, never to be heard from again.

Love’s Arthur Lee was another cracked actor who shattered himself in an acid bath. He pushed against the barriers of race (a black man making white pop), convention (an inveterate Sunset Boulevard dandy, his trademark for a time was to wear only one shoe) and art (1967’s Forever Changes remains a 20th-century pop landmark).

But by the end of the ’60s he was pretty much finished as a recording artist, spending the next 25 years drinking and drugging away whatever was left of his tattered reputation. A five-year prison sentence made him sober and humble, and upon his release a few years back he toured Forever Changes, with string and horn sections, to global acclaim.

But soon enough he was back to his old bad self and was eventually fired by his own backing band. Word came in the spring that he was sick. Lee died Aug. 3 of leukemia. Damn.

Karma Police, Arrest This Blonde

2006-07-13T17:33:00.000-07:00

A Bush Twin Claps Thom Yorke's Eraser.

The cosmic bargain, shook on long ago, clearly states you can't pick your parents or your fans. This partly explains why Thom Yorke, so famously tormented by Radiohead's dizzying ascendancy, has been trying to thin the herd with increasingly inscrutable sounds and arrangements, constantly second-guessing the band's instinct for anthems with arty and invariably electronic detours.

The intent, aside from making some strikingly original music, was to scare off the sheep like a boozy fratboy trying to intimidate a blind date with high speed and fast turns. Except when Yorke finally pulls up to the curb, she doesn't want to get out. In fact, there are more waiting at the curb to get on board.

How else to explain the widely reported presence of one of the Bush twins at a Radiohead concert at Madison Square Garden last month? It's unclear whether it was Jenna or Babs, and really, it doesn't matter. They're basically interchangeable babia majora that came of age during the Republican happy hour, mute to the public imagination aside from the occasional party foul or middle finger to the paparazzi from the back of the limo.

The extent of the compromise between what the diehard fans want and what Radiohead is giving these days seems like peanuts compared to the Bush twins' concession: The coolest band in the world at the moment hates their dad and everything he stands for with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. After all, Hail to the Thief wasn't named for the Hamburglar.

So what to take from this? A grrl-power rebellion in the house of Bush? Maybe. But it's far more likely that going to Radiohead was just what the Prada-and-proud gang of dipshits at whatever A-list Upper West Side watering hole was doing after happy hour. If true, little girl Bush seems to have inherited her father's blind arrogance.

Wisely, the band was kept in the dark until the show was over. Still, I'd give anything to see Yorke react to a Bush in the sixth row. Actually, scratch that—it probably would've ended with Yorke being put to sleep by the guys in dark suits and earpieces.

There's a moment on The Eraser, Yorke's just-out solo album, where you can imagine the singer in his dressing room, being told the daughter of the most powerful and hated man in the universe is in the sixth row. "Well this is fucked up, fuck-ed up," he sings on "Black Swan," dragging the second syllable of "fucked" and giving it a sing-songy lilt that doesn't translate well to print, but you get the picture.

Produced by longtime Radiohead knob-twiddler Nigel Godrich and hatched on Yorke's laptop during downtime, The Eraser largely eschews six-string rockism in favor of noirish glitch electronica. It remains unclear why the songs here didn't just become an even-more-electronic-than-usual Radiohead record, which is basically what it sounds like.

A trial balloon for an eventual solo career? Yorke getting his blip-hop on one last time before the rumored return to straightforward verse-chorus-verse rock? Or maybe the guy just wants to share some ear doodles from his laptop without all the hyperventilating hubbub and unreasonable expectations that greet each new Radiohead album.

If The Eraser proves anything, it's that Thom Yorke doesn't make Radiohead. His Oxford rocker chums are the cape that hides the zipper on the back of his Superman costume. And what will he do without them the next time a Bush twin crash-lands on his planet like a hunk of kryptonite?

Wake Me Up When The 80's Are Over (Again)

2006-06-21T18:47:00.000-07:00

Gettin' Your Hot Chip All Up In My Brightblack Morning Light

Back in the early mid-80s that today's hep cats so lovingly fetishize and cloyingly recycle, there were two kinds of bands. Those that looked forward and those that looked back. The forward-lookers were going for the shock of the new, of course, while the backward-lookers opted for the comfort of the past. The forward-lookers were usually British, had pouffy hair and billowy pastel clothes that snapped and zippered in weird places and all of them seemed to get their names from either A Clockwork Orange or Barbarella-- Duran Duran, Heaven 17, Ultravox. These techno-popsters waved their synthesizers at the backward-lookers like a crucifix in Dracula's face -- and as per the metaphor, the backward-lookers hissed and retreated back into the coffin of rock history, aka the psychedelic 60's.

The backwards-looking bands were mostly American, had shitty hair, wore untucked thrift-store shirts, and they all seemed to get their name from the bottom of a hash pipe: The Rain Parade, Clay Allison, Opal. I really loved the former -- even more as it evolved into the latter two. Lodged in Northern California -- and adept at conjuring baroque, wistfully haunted psych-pop with a slight country inflection -- Opal would, by the end of the 80's, become Mazzy Star.

I remind you of that moment because the overlapping releases of Hot Chip's The Warning and Brightblack Morning Light's self-titled debut reminds me of that moment -- when the choice was old soul cotton or new synthetic blends. Back then, it meant war or at least fisticuffs and heated name-calling. These days, it seems we can all get along. The synth is no longer a four-letter word to rockists -- thanks to Eno, Neu! and Devo -- and dance music has swallowed whole psychedelic-rock's pagan trance-induction mechanisms: infinite reverb, eternal repetition, and transcendental signal manipulation. After all, the trippiest music these days can be heard in dance clubs, not the parking lot of Widespread Panic shows.

Living in a hippie hole somewhere in the aromatic cannabis orchards of Northern California, Brightblack Morning Light are firmly in the tradition of Opal/Mazzy Star -- rubbery Rhodes clangor, tremolo-ripple bass, woozy slide guitar, sex-fogged vocals and whole lot of crystal blue persuasion -- but with a much more adventurous approach to rhythm, poly- or otherwise. In fact, perhaps in a bid to keep the non-high from getting bored, Brightblack sometimes employs the neat trick of making the drums play twice as fast as the rest of the song, giving the proceedings a disembodied dub vibe. Think a Calder mobile, or Ladies and Gentlemen -era Spiritualized with a mesmerizing boy-meets-girl harmonic convergence replacing Jason Pierce's tinny warble. Wonderfully dreamy, blissed-out stuff.

Hot Chip's debut,Come On Strong, was, to my ears, just one more reason to steer clear of the pansy divisions of skinny white dudes in checkered Vans, sleeveless T's and goggly aviators. Hot Chip hails from the absolutely fabulous side of London and the new album has its share of shit-eating Giorgio Moroder redux, the kind that makes me curse aloud the day the kids ever found those Spandau Ballet records and got blinded by science. Elsewhere, though, Hot Chip is headfuckingly psychedelic, sounding like 99 Luftballoons popped, chopped and snorted through a straw of tweaked ambient and gurgling techno. And sometimes, when the deceptively tuneful and disarmingly heart-on-sleeves vocals come to the fore, as on say, "Colours", Hot Chip seem as accessible as the people-pleasing Postal Service's freeze-dried electro-pop. And they probably won't even get beaten up for it. Pity.

2006-06-05T19:02:00.000-07:00

Death To The Pixies!

2006-05-30T16:06:00.000-07:00

All Good Monkeys Go To Heaven

A word of warning: This is gonna be one of those columns where I go on and on about my little monkey shines with famous alt-rock personalities. Millions of people love it when I do that, but others seem to get very, very angry about it, stomp their feet and write mean letters that hurt my feelings. If that sounds like you, stop reading right now. I'm serious. I don't want to even see you in the second paragraph.

Set the Wayback Machine to 1988. I'm a college DJ stranded in the middle of Pennsyltucky. Entranced by the naked boob on the cover of Surfer Rosa, I slap it on the turntable and-they had me by the first 20 seconds of "Where Is My Mind?" and never really let go.

Shortly thereafter I got a gig working for a Pennsyltucky daily. They asked me one day if I wanted to interview some guy named Black Francis from the Pixies. Would I? Man, this was a dream come true. I could finally learn the WTF of lyrics like, "He bought me a soda, he bought me a soda/ And he tried to molest me in the parking lot."

When I got him on the phone, he was no doubt bone-tired from endless touring and weary of answering stupid fanboy questions. He insisted I call him Charles and pretty much refused to give me a straight answer to any question. "Who cares?" he'd say. "We just try to make cool rock music." I remember thinking: what a dick.

The next Pixie I met was Kim Deal, around 1994. The Breeders had just broken huge, and somebody had given Kim's sister Kelley a copy of my band the Psyclone Rangers' debut album. Kelley listed one of the songs as one of her 10 favorites that year in Rolling Stone's end-of-the-year wrap-up.

So I get her on the phone and we hit it off, and she invites me and the band to come hang out backstage at the Philly stop of Lollapalooza. I don't remember much except it was hot and muddy and famous back there. The Psyclone Rangers were about to record our next album down in Memphis. We had a song we wanted that patented Deal-sister vocal on, and Kelley quickly agreed to sing on it.

The night before she was supposed to fly down she called to say she was too sick to leave town. She sounded pretty out of it. Boy, were we bummed. Was it something we said or did? A few days later, when she got busted for receiving a FedEx envelope full of heroin, we put two and two together.

Fast-forward a year. The Psyclone Rangers are in L.A. playing a special pre-album-release club show for all the music-biz poohbahs. The kid who ran our label always bragged he was friends with Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago and drummer Dave Lovering. Yeah, right! Prove it, we'd always say. That night he did.

Apres-gig we're sitting backstage, and who walks in but the guitar player and the drummer from the Pixies, all smiles and compliments. The Pixies had long since split by then, and Santiago had formed a then-trendy cocktail act called the Martinis. To be honest, it was kind of a letdown: The guys from the Pixies don't have anything better to do than hang out with chumps like us?

Fast forward a decade. Following Nirvana's sincere flattery and inspired theft, an entire generation of commercial alt-rock hits built on the Pixies patented song-writing template of lulling verses and volcanic choruses are already in the Where Are They Now? file. Black Francis has become Frank Black, releasing a steady string of increasingly irrelevant solo albums. The Breeders career went up the nose and in the arm of the Deal sisters. The Pixies guitarist went MIA into domesticity and the drummer gave up music to become...wait for it...a magician.

All of which is painstakingly detailed in Fool The World(St.Martin's Griffin), the just-out he said/she said Pixies bio. Told George Plimpton-style, all in quotes, it reads like a 300-page Spin article and will answer every stupid fanboy question Black Francis stopped answering in 1988. Even more compelling is a soon-to-be released documentary called quietLoudquiet, which sort of turns the reunion tour into reality show. The camera follows them everywhere, including the bathroom. Old dramas like the Kim Deal/Black Francis rivalry seem like ancient history, replaced by more current and pressing concerns, like Deal's struggle with sobriety and the drummer's mid-tour meltdown in the wake of his father's sudden death by cancer.
A coupla years ago, my roommate from college calls me up one day to say the Pixies are getting back together. "Just when I stopped caring," I said. That wasn't entirely true. I giddily went to reunion show and contrary to what people who weren't there the first time around said, they were as good as they ever were. The classic songs seem immune to the ravages of age, and besides the Pixies strange allure was never based on the hormones and hair of youth -- unlike, say, a band like the Strokes who already seem a bit past it. These days they are all fatter and balder, but, having settled or set aside the irreconcilable differences of the past, and worked through the addiction-rehab-divorce craziness of middle age, they are also wiser.

Something else happened while they were away. This cult band with its weird, noisy songs about UFOs, incest and bone machines became more famous in death than they ever were in life. They've become part of the great collective alt-rock unconscious -- like the Cure or the first Violent Femmes record. Surfer Rosa is on every punky bar jukebox. Jocks crank "Wave of Mutilation" as they race by in Daddy's car, flipping-off the nerds. And every chick bass player worth her salt has played "Gigantic" until her tits practically fell off. When I saw the Pixies last year, 20,000 people sang along with every word of "Where Is My Mind?" Judging by the median age of the crowd, most were still in short pants when the song first came out. It would seem that the Pixies have become, dare I say it, folk music.

I suppose we all learned something along the way: Kim can't be around alcohol; Black Francis needs to lay off the buffets; the guitarist looks a lot cooler with no hair and the drummer needs to finalize his divorce from Vicadin. For me, it's that Black Francis was right all along. All that soap opera jive? What does it really matter in the end? Especially when the only thing worth remembering is this: If man is five, then the Devil is six and God is seven. Or to put it another way, the Pixies were just four kids from Boston trying to make cool rock music whose monkey died and went to heaven.

2006-05-04T12:09:00.000-07:00

WAR OF DISTORTION
Mr. Young Goes To Washington

When Stephen Colbert hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner -- the annual D.C. puppet show where reporters play pattycake with the Prez -- he rode the Trojan Horse of Truthiness right up to the President's table and unleashed its hidden contents: a disinfecting dose of reality-based reality, thinly-coated with irony for easier digestion, though impossible to swallow for those weaned on Fox News comfort food. Speaking truth to power at point blank-range, Colbert's barbs essentially added up to: The emperor has no clothes, and all of you, the Fourth Estate, have become nothing more than royal dressers. No wonder Colbert's performance was greeted with pin-drop silence and muzzled in the coverage of the event. It is a sad day for the Republic when the job of truth-telling falls to the clowns.

Increasingly, rock music is stepping into the breach, bridging the yawning chasm between what is real and what is permitted. There was a time when I would have thought the protest song had outlived its usefulness. Turns out no generation gets the protest songs it wants, it gets the protest songs it needs. What's that you say? Preaching to the choir? Well, look around, son -- there ain't, no choir. That all changes with Neil Young's Living With War, wherein Young employs a massive power-to-the-people choir to recite his words, themselves essentially articles of impeachment that Neil stacks on an electric chair of metallic folk-punk. This is Neil, the righteous electric warrior, rockin' in the free world. Like Colbert's performance, Living With War essentially points out that our Dear Leader is stark ravin' nekkid, cataloguing the bald-faced lies that led us into quagmire, keep us divided and afraid and the resulting slow-but-steady amputation of the national soul. If the congressional Dems don't have the balls to say it, our hairy Canadian friend will: It is time for us to wake-up from our long national nightmare.

Coming on the heels of a major concert movie/album release, and written and recorded in three weeks in March and rushed out to the Internet and CD sellers this week, Living With War is blog rock -- or more accurately, rock as blog. Brash, raw and immediate. And to make sure his point is not lost on the common man, Young dresses these songs up in his best distressed-jeans freedom-rock -- think Rust Never Sleep's garage-punk crunch -- and reclaims the flag, mom, apple pie, truth, justice and the American Way from the war pigs. But the most powerful moment is when that big, soulful choir does "America The Beautiful" -- sounding fierce, wounded, and saddened but resolute. It contains multitudes: you can hear New Orleans drowning, you can hear the towers falling, and bombs bursting in air over Baghdad.

"We are the silent majority now, and we haven't done a damn thing," Young told the New York Times recently. "We've stood by and watched this happen. But there's more of us than there is of them, and we have to do something. When people start talking and see they can get away with it, it's going to happen everywhere. It's going to be a landslide, it's going to be a tidal wave. This is just the tip of it."

As fucked as things are, there is reason to believe we've finally reached the tipping point. Thankfully our forefathers were very wise men who wove into the fabric or our democracy hidden mechanisms to stop the slimy creep of fascism, like salt on a slug. One of them is free speech. Don't laugh, it can stop tanks dead in their tracks.

(Illustration by Alex Fine, poster by Frank Kozik)

Amazing Grace

2006-04-22T12:57:00.000-07:00

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
WE SHALL OVERCOME:THE SEEGER SESSIONS

It's no accident that you don't really know what Pete Seeger did. That he's truly larger than life, an American original, the kind that walk out of storybooks, like Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed, but more real. That he more or less singlehandedly carried the burden of pure roll-up-your-sleeves and speak-truth-to-power lefty populism, social justice and humanitarian conscience on his back for the better part of the 20th Century, with amazing grace and without complaint. For his trouble he's been tarred and feathered, beaten and blacklisted, and officially written out of history text books.

In the hunched autumn of his life -- he's now 87 -- he's wandered in the same off-the-radar wilderness of hush puppy gentility that Jimmy Carter's been exiled to, where nobody really listens and no good deed goes unpunished. For reasons that remain unclear, Jesus Christ is considered a savior and guys like Pete Seeger are considered fools -- well-meaning possibly but unrealistic granola-munching ninnies just the same -- even though their morality and politics are exactly the same. Maybe some day, when the Matrix is finally unplugged, the scales will fall from our eyes.

Sure he can be stick-in-the-mud and a fuss budget about interpretation, and it's true he did get fightin' mad when Dylan went electric. Boy, if Seeger had a hammer that day, well, thinks would be a lot different. Still, that was a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away. It's time for Americana's Obi-wan to pass his burden to a younger Jedi. On We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, The Boss, bless his heart, puts a lotta elbow grease into spit shinin' a legacy tarnished by neglect, and Seeger's songbook -- which he would be the first to admit is really America's songbook, he's just the wizardly shepherd -- cleans up real nice, and the mantel fits the Boss like an old pair of jeans, the kind that make his ass look good to women of Certain Age.

Assembling a non-E Street magic band of jolly folkateers, the Boss mans the captain's wheel, barking out orders, making up arrangements on the fly -- all the songs recorded live literally in the living room, no rehearsal, just hit "record" and let's go -- and steers his wooden ship towards the same rockets red glare twilight so palpable on Wilco/Billy Bragg's Mermaid Avenue series. The result is easily the best Springsteen album, E-Street Band or no E-Street band, since Nebraska. The problem heretofore was that there was only two kinds of Bruce: Springsteen that's good for you and Springsteen that feels good -- jugband or "Jungleland.". There was either the big rolling chromewheelfuelinjected rock n' roll hot rod of the E-Street band or there were these solemn folk records, the musical equivalent of the Boss riding one of those old-timey bicycles with the big fuckin' front tire. Problem is, people in Jersey think those bikes are gay.

The unintended irony is that despite The Boss' efforts to the contrary, those big arena-rockin' bar band anthems are the folk music -- you know, music for folks -- and the folkie records are kinda for highbrows and elites. At best those records and shows are endured, if not flat-out ignored by your 700 Level sittin' working man, who waits patiently for another brewski-hoistin' E-Street album or tour. The Seeger Sessions will change all that. It's fuckin' hoot: Dixieland stomps, blue grass highs, mountain rags, porchfront hoedowns, pass the jug-a-wine gang-yell singalongs. It's gonna sound great up on lawn seats, where we will join arm in arm, beers-in-hand and sway. And on this much we will agree: That we think we're so clever classless and free, but we're still fuckin' peasants as far as we can see. Still, we shall overcome. Someday.

At The Twilight's Last Gleaming

2006-04-10T00:49:00.000-07:00

The Lonesome Crowded Death Of Grandaddy And All Who Sailed With It

The posthumous album by Grandaddy opens with the forlorn voice of a child simultaneously invoking the album's title and asking the question innocents invariably ask in the wake of a divorce, fire, flood, hurricane, towering inferno, earthquake or Poseidon adventure: What Ever Happened To The Family Cat? Trust me kid, you don't want to know.

As you have no doubt heard by now, this will be the final Grandaddy album and, really, that should come as no surprise. Most bands have a shelf life of ten years tops -- five in obscurity trying to get your attention, and another five trying desperately not to squander it. By then, the ultimatums of long-suffering significant others, accruing debt, mounting substance abuse issues and internecine in-the-van squabbling conspire to break the back of even the strongest rock steeds. Bands like Grandaddy are in a war of attrition with the Fame Machine, and invariably the Machine wins -- not least of all because it does not have to contend with personal debt, screaming girlfriends and passive aggressive drummers that hog the van-porn and the shotgun seat. So be it.

Grandaddy served it's purpose well, messengering home soft bulletins about the collateral damage incurred in the Tectonic shift of centuries: the prevailing po-faced melancholy of living in a disposable technocracy, where khaki cubicle drones dream of electric sheep under Ikea lights, and todays' iPod is tomorrows space junk.To do so, they borrowed liberally: The Pixies' angular rockism; Stereolab's jangling Moog vistas; Neil Young's shivery, high-lonesome yelp; ELO's syncretic symphonic whoosh. And somehow they made it all fit like a snug North Face fleece. Everyone who already loves Grandaddy is gonna love this album because, really, the music hasn't changed much since 2000's solar-powered classic, The Sophtware Slump -- but the stakes have.
Weep not for the lonesome, crowded death of Grandaddy, dear reader, weep for yourselves, and let us bury our brothers in arms in echoing halls of lasting praise and glory. Future generations will one day disinter all our palaver, which will have long since been buried under miles of binary code at the bottom of the Internet, and they will listen to the totems Grandaddy left behind the same way we look at those Easter Island statues. And then, truly, the grizzly bears of Grandaddy will at long last be regarded as the American idols.
Grandaddy may not get there with us but they have seen the promised land: A home where the buffalo roam, where never is heard a discouraging word, the skies are not cloudy and grey, and wireless is free and plentiful.In G-daddy's absence, any number of Americana bands that were previously pulling up the rear will now vie to walk point. I nominate Seattle's Band Of Horses, whose Everything All The Time These dropped a few weeks back -- typically, with all the fanfare and cultural impact of a teardrop exploding in the Pacific. These guys are hardly the first band to walk through the desert on a horse with no name, but by gawd do they nail the sad-eyed grandeur of that whole Cosmic Americana thing -- like a fine puree of Mercury Rev, Lips, G-daddy, My Morning Jacket Built To Spill -- which, for reasons that remain damnably unclear, works like musical Viagra on British critics but seems to have about the same impact on statesiders as a dog shown a card trick.

Play it at your Grandaddy wake, and will the last Americana band to be played on the radio please bring the flag.

(Artwork By Alex Fine)

Cosmic Americana

2006-04-01T10:43:00.000-08:00

THE FLAMING LIPS
At War With The Mystics
(Warner Bros.)

Having become sentient in the mid-70s, somewhere in the middle of that that vast mountainous Pennsyltucky between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, I had a front row seat to one of the places where the 60's went to die: the hinterlands. While more cosmopolitan zip codes were sampling disco, cocaine, Members Only jackets and punk, all I could see growing up was ex-greaser shitkickers in dirty bellbottoms, Greg Brady haircuts, faded Dark Side of The Moon T-shirts and knocked-up girlfriends in peasant dresses billowing with pre-natal pulchritude, blasting Zep, Floyd and Yes in souped-up Camaros as they raced off to yet another keggar in the woods. I have it on good authority that the Flaming Lips grew up under similar circumstances in Oklahoma city. And much of their early career sounds like a band failing wonderfully to recreate their older brother's classic rock album collection -- without the pedigree, chops, major label magnanimity or luck of being at the right place at the right time that helped make so much of that music unforgettable. By the early 90s, they had discovered syrupy melody and radio-ready precision only complimented their appetite for noise and whimsy. By the late 90s, they had fully copped to their love of gatefold prog-rock, which was only then recovering a measure of respectability after years of punk's libelous whispering campaign. By the 21s Century, the Lips had fully embraced electronica, J-pop and pumping house music, and ingeniously grafted the best elements of those musics to recreate their tangerine dreams. They drove in this direction pretty much until the wheels came off with relatively recently with a series of increasingly pointless re-mix EPs that finally wrung all the seemingly bottomless flava out of 2002's uniformly excellent Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. The new At War With The Mystics -- how's that for a zeitgeist-capturing title? -- finds the Lips re-calibrating the ratios of clicks/buzzes/BPMs to classic hesher-rock, striking a balance that older rockist fans will more pleasing all the while retaining the gravity-defying superpowers that point-and-click production techniques afford mere mortal guitar-bands. As such, At War With The Mystics should please all facets of the Lips surging constituency: the ex-ravers that have seen the light; indie-rockers in search of father figures; aging acid casualties still trying to go furthur; and the people that choose music for commercials. I'll spare you the requisite adjective orgies about specific songs -- the whole album is currently streaming over at flaminglips.com -- but barring the occasional lapse into previously-chewed scenery, and the inclusion of the weak-ass "Mr. Ambulance Driver", this is yet another reason to believe that the Flaming Lips' psychedelic hot air balloon is still the most reliable transport to book when you wanna go somewhere over the rainbow.

Come On Feel The Rage

2006-03-24T14:21:00.000-08:00

DISCUSSED: IRISH GIRLFRIENDS; THE IRA; RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE; MUMIA; PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN; THE END OF DEMOCRACY; AND JUST HOW AWESOME IS THIS PHOTO OF BRIAN JONES?
Five years and three girlfriends ago, Rage Against the Machine was on the FOP shitlist for staging a Free Mumia concert at the Meadowlands. Mumia, as you may have heard, was convicted of killing officer Daniel Faulkner. None of that hubub was much on my radar back then. But my gal at the time, well, she was pretty hardcore Irish, Up The Ra! and all that. Her aunt was a tough-but-sweet old broad that was up to her elbows in The Troubles, if you know what I mean. Let's just say that some of the proceeds from those beef n' brews she threw might have wound up putting butter and guns on the table in Belfast. Suffice it to say that Faulkner was an Irish martyr in the eyes of her family.

One day she came by my place and told me she was breaking up with me because I had Rage Against The Machine's Evil Empire CD in my apartment. Still in the wrapper mind you.
"I didn't buy it, it got sent to me," I protested. She had a great ass.
"Why don't you get rid of it then?"
"I might have to write about it some day."
"It came out four years ago. If you loved me you would get rid of it."

She was kidding, but only by half. Truth be told she never really looked at me the same after that. Long story short, she left and Rage stayed. All these girlfriends later, I didn't get around to listening to it until I saw The Party's Over. Directed by Donovan Leitch and hosted by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, The Party's Over, isn't very good, in fact it's a rather anemic dollar-short-day-late stab at x-raying the blackened heart of American democracy. But there are two must-see moments that justify the rental fee. The first is a lot of never-seen footage of rioters clashing with cops in the streets of Philadelphia during the 2000 Republican convention. (Watch it again, and after everything that came after, tell me you don't see it all differently.) From here the film cuts to the LA cops igniting a bloody riot when they shutdown an incendiary street performance by Rage Against the Machine outside the Democratic National Convention a few weeks later. Rage had thousands in the streets. That was the last time an American rock band scared the shit out of the powers that be.

I put on Evil Empire and the shoe still fits, it stomps out of the speakers like a Hendrixian bull in the Columbine china shop of Clinton's America. When Evil Empire came out in 1996, it just sounded like shrill sloganeering to me. After all, our guy was in the White House, he may have a little of the devil in him, but it's the devil we know. Sure there's injustices great and small, but we have peace, prosperity, Stereolab and the Internet stocks are gonna make us all independently wealthy. All of us.
That was, as Karl Rove likes to say, a pre-9/11 mentality. Listening to Evil Empire now, it sounds to me like rumbling war drums foretelling the great clash of civilizations. I feel the rage. I hate rap-rock as much as you, but really, it's come to this: the sky is really falling. Mister we could use a band like Rage Against The Machine again. A band that scares the shit out of the powers that be, a band that pounds lies into dust with their bare hands. A fist that slams on the table and rattles the chess pieces. A band that brings the huddled masses into the streets, a band that must be stopped. And no, I'm not just talking about Audioslave.

Patsy inClined

2006-03-10T03:05:00.000-08:00

Neko Case And Jenny Lewis Got Nothin' On Patsy Montana

As of 2005, Patsy Cline's 12 Greatest Hits sold 10 million copies. Not bad for a ghost. She got on a plane to Kansas City in 1963 -- just a couple years into her newfound fame as the sweetheart of the Nashville rodeo -- and never came back, disappearing into the ether of immortality like Amelia Earhart in spurs. Her ghost has been haunting American music ever since, and any vaguely countryish thrush will have to suffer comparisons. Just ask KD Lang. Still, Patsy Cline didn't come from nothing. Her colorized visage has become iconic: inky black locks, ruby lips, ultra-brite smile lighting up a moonpie face, decked out in full-on cowgirl regalia like Bob Wills with boobs.

But that's actually the spitting image of Patsy Montana, the artist formerly known as Rubeye Blevins, who struck out on her own after a stint in the Montana Cowgirls, and sold a million copies of her self-penned "I Want To Be A Cowboy's Sweetheart" in 1935.
Admittedly, as a singer, Montana's got nothing on Cline, and as a songwriter, well, let's just say she's no Willie Nelson, but her yodelin' yarn of barnyard romance was like opium to to the poor and huddled masses of the Depression, clustered around the wireless in tarpaper shacks.
It certainly was to teenaged Virginia Patterson Hensley, jerking sodas at' Gaunt's Drugstore in one-horse Winchester Virginia, trying to escape the clutches of her lecherous father and dreaming of the promised land of country music stardom. Not for nothing would she later change her name to Patsy Cline.
All these years later, the twangy heartbreak dreamscapes of the singing cowgirl still enchant -- after all, we're still depressed, and still clustering around the wireless. And the torch-song has been passed to succeeding generations, from Loretta Lynn to Linda Ronstadt to Nora Jones. In alt-country circles, Patsy Cline casts a shadow of influence rivaled only by Billie Holiday. It is here, on the edges of that enduring moonlit cowgirl silhouette, that exceptional new releases by Neko Case and Jenny Lewis work their corn-fed magic. Heretofore, both were, in some quarters, better known for their involvement in other bands -- Case blares the New Pornographers' immaculate rhapsodies, Lewis' voice is the pleasant breeze that flies Rilo Kiley's indie-pop kite -- but that will soon change.

Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, is the fifth album from Case in nearly twice as many years, and it marks her emergence as a major player. Long praised for her leather-lungs, clarion tone -- like God's private car alarm, some have opined -- and take-exactly-no-shit-from-anybody chutzpah, Case reveals herself to also be a cunning linguist. Some have taken issue with the album's elliptical ambiguities and animal kingdom allegories, but I think they push her whole act into wholly original territory, an intriguing x-factor that sets off the relative familiarity of the settings: spare desert-blown Americana from the Calexico/Giant Sand savants, deep-bottom guitar twang from the Sadies, the Band's Garth Hudson's spectral organ and piano, and miles and miles of reverb. But it is Case's voice that pulls this train through the tunnel, over and over again.

On Rabbit Fur Coat, Jenny Lewis's crystalline timbre cuts through a fog of reverb like a searchlight. Backed by the bewitching Watson Twins, Lewis seems to be walking out of a scene from the Shining on the cover. Nobody gets axe murdered in the course of the album, except perhaps the future of Rilo Kiley. This becomes apparent on the rapturous cover of the Traveling Willbury's "Handle Me With Care" where she is joined by nouveau Willbury's Conor Oberst, Ben Gibbard and M. Ward. Puts the "hoot" in hootenanny, it does.

Pussy Galore

2006-02-22T03:19:00.000-08:00

Cat Power Purrs! Destroyer Kills!

The only drag about living in the Information Age is that there are no miracles, just miraculous statistical anomolies otherwise known as coincidence. True story -- happened on November 21st , 2002, 35 miles south of Birmingham, Alabama, according to the New York Times -- two sisters decided to make unannounced visits to each other's houses, at exactly the same time. They both died in a head-on crash -- with each other. Tragic? Sure. Freakish? You bet. Impossible? Statistically speaking, nothing is impossible. There are enough people now living on Earth that anything can and eventually will happen.

Consider that the average person will have a "million-to-one" coincidence happen to them every three years. Most of them will be pretty meaningless, nearly all of it will pass without notice or remembrance. But every now and then, lightning will strike twice. I am talking about the new Destroyer and Cat Power albums, of course. Released within weeks of each other, Cat Power's The Greatest and Destroyer's Rubies finds two infamously inscrutable artists, whose careers heretofore have been unrelated, making big, beautifully understated records that run into each by accident. Both walk away without a scratch. Coincidence? Absolutely.

What binds these two is a borderline artistic personality: blurry, unstable self-images moodswinging in and out of recognizability. Are they who they sing they are? For Destroyer this is a parlor game, for Cat Power it's closer to a plea for medication. Destroyer is essentially Dan Bejar, inscrutable weird-beard Vancouver pop-savant, perhaps better known for contributing the best songs on New Pornographer's albums. Every Destroyer album seems to have amnesia about the one that came before -- it could be shambling, pretzel-twist indie-pop; could be guitar-less synth-pap or it could be classic-rock burlesque. But each can be counted on for any number of things: nimble playing, verbal jousting, eviscerating wit, rug-pulling plot twists, absurd putdowns, ridiculous assertions, outrageous dares, unnanswered prayers, curses and imprecations, tasty licks and a few killer hooks. If ever there was a songwriter who writes for the critics it's Bejar. And the funny thing is critics give themselves hemoroids trying to explain the why and the what-it-all-means, but with Bejar that's besides the point. Mostly, he's just fucking with you. And still they soft-shoe around their typewriters like Vaudville hams, desperately trying to pull the Titanic out of a tophat. Bejar chuckles at their tongue-tied folly and shrugs. "I'm just another West Coast maximalist exploring the blues, ignoring the news" he sings on the new album as if daring them to drop it in the review, before pirating the ghost ship of Neil Young's "Down By The River".

On The Greatest, Cat Power is just another Southern folk-blues minimalist exploring R&B who makes the news when she gets spooked and cancels a tour. Cat Power is, of course, the lovely Chan Marshall, 10 years into an acclaimed career as indie's most spellbinding, yet easily freaked folkie. Her new album finds her working with a cast of Memphis soul session legends, guys with names like Teenie and Flick who've backed up the likes of Al Green, Booker T. and Aretha Franklin. She recorded in Ardent studios, birthplace of Big Star's Sister Lovers, the Rosetta Stone of artily damaged mope-rock, but this time out she never sounds mopey or damaged, having traded her Ophelia-with-a-guitar persona for Dusty In Memphis's white go-go boots. If it sounds like a mid-career stab at being a grown-up, she wears it well. Sure, grown-ups can be a little drifty and dull at times, but they don't flub their lines and they finish their songs like the vegetables on their plate.

Nerds Do It Longer

2006-02-13T03:01:00.000-08:00

Stars of Track and Field Still F*ck Like Champs

Boy-o-boy, did Joey Sweeney get his underoos in a bunch when I mentioned that a new Belle & Sebastian album was cause for "a legion of cardigan-clad Millhouses to raise their skinny arms to heaven like antennae." Speaking like a man who's taken all the lockeroom towel-snapping he was gonna take for one lifetime, he told me to get my gang together and meet his gang on the playground for a badminton death match. I don't know if you've ever seen Sweeney's shuttlecock, but needless to say I was concerned. Dude's been workin' out.

I only mention this because the new Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit, sounds like a band that's not gonna take any more shit off anyone. To me, it marks the final triumph of "twee" over "lad". Twee, for those that don't mark key points in their lives by the semi-obscure Scottish b-sides you were listening to at the time, is a Brit euphemism, a babytalk mispronunciation of the word "sweet", and usually refers to something unbearably precious. The term actually dates back to the dawn of the 20th Century and was usually used in the pejorative, but in the mid-80s, a gaggle of jangly Glaswegian indie-poppers adopted the term as a badge of honor. Lad, or laddishness, has the same Maxim mag raison d'tre in England as it does here: get drunk, screw something, preferably a female, and barring that, come last call, kick the shit out of someone, preferably smaller than you.

Twee verus lad is basically the latest skirmish in the mods-versus-the-rockers war that's been going on since the 60s. The haircuts may change, but the battle rages on. Ten years ago, when Belle & Sebastian released their Tigermilk debut, grunge was still, literally, all the rage. Rap-rock was ascendent. Scott Stapp, Fred Durst, Scott Weiland were the new alpha dawgs of rock, each destined for a bone of stardom they would all choke on eventually. They did it all for the nookie.

While lads went out night after night and drank, drugged or fucked themselves into ass-clown status, the twee kids in Belle and Sebastian took care of themselves. They wore a scarf when it was cold. They got a good night's sleep. They wore a mac in the rain. They wrote and recorded songs with the dutiful regularity of homework and the giddy invention of a science fair project. Or so goes the preciously crafted image. Truth is, twee kids like sex, do drugs, and even get drunk from time to time. Even Joey Sweeney.

Jocks may do it harder, but nerds do it longer. If rock n' roll really is just high school with money, longevity is the revenge of the nerds -- it's like money in the bank. You ever been to a high school reunion? Ever notice how all the quarterbacks and the cheerleaders all seem to have peaked long ago, how they've all morphed into middle class suburban shlubs or wide-assed soccer moms? They don't know Belle & Sebastian from Wallace and Gromit. And all the nerds from back in the day, where are they? They wouldn't be caught dead here. They have long since evolved into something too cool for school reunions. And while Scott Weiland is fronting a Gun's N' Roses tribute band, Scott Stapp is literally crying for a reporter from Rolling Stone, and Fred Durst is making cellphone cam porn tapes, Belle & Sebastian are on top of their game, sounding younger than yesterday, still making pure pop for now people.

The Art Is Deceitful Above All Things

2006-02-12T00:50:00.000-08:00

(Painting by Killer Luka)

JT Leroy Is A Great Literary Hoax, But A Mediocre Rock N' Roll Swindle

I have a distant cousin who once punked his parents into believing he'd been going to college, when in fact he had been pocketing the tuition dough and playing video games at the mall -- for four years! That his parents were divorced and lived states away from each other and the college helped facilitate the deception. He tearfully confessed on the eve of his supposed graduation. There was a big party planned: catering tent, live band, folks flying in from all over the country. What a mess. When I told a friend, he said: "It's like he deserves some kind of medal...or prison sentence."

I had a similar reaction when it was revealed recently that the person who wrote Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is not a teenaged-rentboy-turned-celebrated-belletrist after all. Turns out JT Leroy is the nom de plume of Laura Albert, a middle-aged mom with rock star dreams. Because LeRoy's work always skirted the fringes of memoir, it was his lurid backstory that authenticated the power of the prose: a tender-aged white trash West Virginian, forced to dress like a girl and sold into prostitution by his beloved lot lizard mom, winds up a HIV-positive self-lacerating basket case in San Francisco, faxing off early drafts of his private hell to his literary mentors from public restrooms in between turning tricks. His abuse so profound, his connection to reality now so tenuous and hallucinatory, LeRoy emerges this street-urchin seer, a gutter poet looking up at the stars. Cue deafening applause on the left and right coasts.

To further burnish this mythology, Albert invested enormous amounts of time and energy courting celebrities and media gate-keepers that could further le cause LeRoy, plying their sympathies with exotic gifts, marathon late-night calls and endless emails. The A-list of the dearly decieved is fairly glittering: Dave Eggers, Bono, Zadie Smith, Madonna, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Carrie Fisher, Yoko Ono, Vanity Fair, Bloomsbury Press, Da Capo books, the New York Times (which ultimately unmasked him/her after first glowingly profiling him, then hiring him, then firing him after he refused to prove he was who he said he was). Weep not for them, dear reader, they knew the risks. Barring the questionable morality of masquerading as HIV-positive, Albert was well within her rights as an artist. Art uses tiny lies to tell larger truths -- it is short for artifice, after all. In time, the less-than-flattering truths revealed about those who flocked moth-like to JT LeRoy's flame and basked in the backlight of his reflected glory may transcend the bleak revelations of the books themselves.

Albert was able to spin the critic's buzz and celebrity connections into a best-selling JT Leroy brand, inking two movie deals, securing high-profile writing and editing gigs, and promoting a line of merchandise. Recently LeRoy rolled out his latest franchise: a mediocre rock band called Thistle LLC. LeRoy writes the lyrics, Albert handles vocals and her husband plays guitar. Thistle specializes in the kind of spiky, chick-fronted riff-rock that Amy Rigby already nailed to perfection on "Dancing With Joey Ramone". To put it in local terms, minus the JT LeRoy imprimatur, Thistle would at best rate an anonymous Tuesday night support slot at the Khyber. Maybe a Wednesday, but definitely not a Thursday.

As for the, quality of the Albert's prose I will say this: she writes lyrically of barbarous sodomy. But I suspect there will be some critical evaluation, and the halo will dim, or perhaps go out altogether. Surely some if not all that high-handed praise was a leg-up to a deeply-troubled and dying 16-year-old boy writing his way out of darkness, not a thirtysomething women writing her way into the limelight.

Time Takes A Cigarette

2006-02-10T21:08:00.000-08:00

Discussed:
Aladdin Sane (30th Anniversary Two-CD Edition)

Detroit circa 1973 more or less WAS A Clockwork Orange, a post-apocalyptic urban dystopia minus the funny Brit accents but with added ultra-violence and racial strife. Bowie channeled the Motor City vibe from the safety of four-star hotel rooms, envisioning a plotless rock opera of leather-clad bully boys and pimped-out thuggery where panic strutted around on platform shoes and you just know somebody was gonna get slapped. Back then Bowie held a cracked mirror up to rock 'n' roll and reflected it back as art, trading glittering extraterrestrial personas like spangled jumpsuits, each more garish, cokeheaded and alienated than the last. Aladdin Sane climbed out of the same crash-landed saucer as Ziggy Stardust and--with Mick Ronson's phasers-set-for-kill guitars chauffeuring--promptly limousined himself across America on a search-and-destroy mission against the ordinary. Bowie could be such a bitch, and everyone who turned up at those shows had a gay old time. Perched midway between queeny Brechtian cabaret, white-faced Kabuki theater and throbbing cock-rock burlesque, Aladdin Sane was originally intended as B-movie filler to capitalize on Ziggy's rock-star ascendancy. But in the intervening 33 years it has ripened into a bell-bottomed glam classic.

This Record Is Illegal

2006-02-09T05:02:00.000-08:00

Donna Summer
This Needs to Be Your Style
IRRITANT RECORDS

First thing you need to know is that this has nothing to do with disco diva Donna Summer, but is instead an identity-theft/media prank on the scale of the Negativland/U2 showdown in the '90s. The first hint is the cover, which features a grainy black and white photo of what appears to be a satanic ritual but upon closer inspection is actually some dirtball metal band apres-gig, wringing the sweat out of their T-shirts and getting high in their graffiti-scarred dressing room. The second giveaway comes when you press "play" and out comes what can best be described as the aural paroxysms of an epileptic Mac with a bellyful of Kazaa. This black-market release, currently the must-have of the Wire set, is the handiwork of Williamsburg audio guerilla Jason Forrest. Part recombinant point-and-click blip-hop, part mutated monster mash-up, This Needs to Be Your Style is a mesmerizing and often disorienting reminder that songs and sounds get stolen every day and secreted away to the digital chop-shops of Brooklyn and London only to be tossed back into the cyber slipstream in a kind of catch-and-release program. There are enough hot-wired samples here--J. Geils Band, the Pretenders, U2, Supertramp--to get Forrest sued back to the Stone Age. My guess is that when the RIAA goon squad shows up at his downmarket Williamsburg flat with a can of whup-ass, they're gonna kick down the door and find a guy who looks like Badly Drawn Boy, a lump of Moroccan hash the size of a bowling ball and a Mac iBook with a belt in its mouth. Then, most likely, they'll pump their shotguns while yelling "Run, boy!" and give him 30 paces to make it look like he was trying to get away before they shoot him in the head.

Furry Blooze

2006-02-09T05:00:00.000-08:00

Discussed:

Furry Lewis
Good Morning Judge
FAT POSSUM

Sometimes, as the saying goes, having a little luck is the best plan. Furry Lewis was never much for planning, and luck was a luxury he could rarely afford. From the age of 12, he spent the better part of his life as a street sweeper in Memphis or working medicine shows, where charlatans sold snake oil to gullible yokels. When Furry was 17, he lost his leg hoppin' freight trains. Legend has it that a friend came to the hospital and Furry told him, "It ain't so bad. I can see the ice cream factory from here." Like most post-World War II Delta mojo men, Furry was just a generation or two out of forty-acres-and-a-mule. Life--with its "whites only" water fountains and back-of-the-bus mandates--was an open wound, and the blues was the salve. Furry played a sort of droning porch-lit trance-blues, prodded by rocking-chair toe-tap rhythms and flyswatter beats, nearly all of which, like most good blues, start with "I woke up this morning ... " Furry's may have been a flea-bitten hound dog of a life, but good God almighty he was alive and glad to be, and nobody--not the judge who locked him up or the doctor who sawed his leg off, not even Jesus Christ himself--could take that away.

Brit Papa

2006-02-06T23:22:00.000-08:00

LET US NOW PRAISE RAY DAVIES
Before we get started do yourself a favor: cue up "Waterloo Sunset" by the Kinks. Ah, don't you feel better already? Music in the left speaker, vocals in the right -- totally old school. That twinkling strum of brotherly guitar and gently piddling snare, those drowsy sha-la-las drifting upwards while the bass line tumbles downwards, and the comforting sentiment that even the shittiest day on Earth ends with a glimpse-of-paradise sunset. That, my friend, is the sound of your father's Brit-pop. They don't make singles like that anymore -- Damon Albarn has long since stopped even trying. Sadly the Gallagher brothers haven't.

As a Modish a young man, back when London was swinging and shagadelic , he authentically articulated the quiet desperation of middle-aged English milquetoasts straight-jacketed in Cardigan sweaters and stuck at the crossroads of fat wives, cold tea and limp biscuits; the fashion slavery of Carnaby Street dandies; the lazy, summery noontides of stoned Victoriana, where nobody is all that concerned that London Bridge is falling down and, hey, what was in that marmalade anyway? He also wrote "Lola" and then married Chrissie Hynde only to have her leave him for, of all people, the lead singer of Simple Minds. The Kinks more or less puttered out at the dawn of MTV, although they've never officially pulled the plug. In a recent BBC interview he all but predicted a future Kinks reunion, assuming his brother Dave continues to recover from a recent debilitating stroke. He also revealed that his brother is now living with him. To appreciate the irony of this, you should know that the Brothers Davies are notorious for being at each other's throats since they were kids, sticking knitting needles into their guitar amps. I say screw the Kinks reunion -- at this point, they'll never do better than evoke the weakest song on Kinks Chronicles One -- give 'em a TV show.

Curiously, as the teenage wasteland of the 60s aged into middle-aged waistbands, Davies' had relatively little to say about it, choosing instead to transmute the story of his youth into books and theater. Now he's finally weighing in: "Is there life after breakfast?" he asks on Other People's Lives, his gem-studded solo debut, out this month on V-2. Well, yes, once you take your pills and drink your tea, he concludes. Cold comfort, I know, but it will happen to you and it will happen to me. In recent years, Davies has become a habitue of the Big Easy. He was strolling through the French Quarter last year when he was shot in the leg after giving chase to the man who had just mugged his girlfriend -- no doubt intending to give the young rapskallion a jolly good rogering. America's always been a secret unrequited love of Davies: he loves her; she shoots him. But if the Kinks hadn't been banned from the U.S. for bad behavior for four years back in the mid 60s, during what was indisputably the band's peak, the Kinks could have been at least as big as John The Baptist.

The Walls Have Ears

2006-02-06T23:15:00.000-08:00

"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on." --William Burroughs

First they came for the terrorists, and I did not speak out, for I was not a terrorist. Then they came for the protesters, and I did not speak out, for I was not a protester. Then they came for Google, and I did not speak out because I was not a search engine.
Then they came for me...

In the last month, the following changes in the Land of the Free have come to light: the latest software update of iTunes, version 6.0.2, secretly installs spyware on your computer that tells Apple what you you're playing on your computer; the Justice Department successfully subpoenaed the search queries of millions of computer users -- quite possibly you or me -- from Microsoft, AOL and and Yahoo (which we only learned of because of Google's well-publicized refusal to cooperate); the Pentagon has been collecting extensive dossiers on any American citizen involved in anti-war groups within protesting distance of military installations, in the name of force protection; the NSA has been conducting a massive domestic data mining operation, monitoring the phone calls, emails and web use of American citizens in the dogged pursuit of evildoers.

The Preznit is currently in campaign mode to dumb the debate down to: you're either for spying on Americans or for the terrorists, which side are you on, Son? Well, since you asked, Sir, I'm for the Constitution, which, unlike the Bible, I take literally. It has this wonderful little passage called the Fourth Amendment, which explicitly affirms: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

For 217 years, American presidents have taken office by solemnly swearing "to preserve, protect and defend" -- not the American people, but something bigger, something even more precious and vulnerable -- "the Constitution of the United States." To even say as much out loud these days is to risk being shouted down by a pack of rabid right wing attack dogs barking in unison: Why don't you just have Osama's baby, already!

Which is why the folks at Against The War On Terror (www.againstwot.com) advocate rejecting the very nomenclature that the President uses to frame the current debate on national security. By even walking onto that linguistic playing field, we lose, they say. The Neocons are at the wheel and the Dems are just backseat drivers, annoyingly pointing over Dad's shoulder and getting their hands smacked away by Karl Rove. The Right wing will continue to pervert every election into another dreadful season of 9/11 Fear Factor and cling to their vaunted permanent majority until We The People shift the paradigm.

Terrorism is not an enemy, it's a tactic; this is not a war, it's criminal matter. A serious global criminal matter, perhaps, but a criminal matter nonetheless. And we will prosecute this criminal matter with all due diligence, make all necessary homeland safeguards (more emphasis on securing ports and nuclear power plants, less on castrating the First and Fourth Amendments) and establish a vast global dragnet via international cooperation. I can't help but wonder if we had taken this approach from, say, Afghanistan onwards, we'd have Osama in Supermax lockdown by now instead of getting our asses shot off in Iraq.

Lastly, we will NOT make this a non-stop pageant of fear to cynically manipulate the American people into trading real liberty for the illusion of security. Because that would be un-American. For it is then and only then, when that terrible compromise is brooked by a frightened nation -- that the terrorists will have truly won.

Top 5 Of The Moment

2006-02-06T15:07:00.000-08:00

THE INVISIBLE MAN

Now out on DVD, HBO's The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is, like the titular changeling himself, by turns fascinating, tragic, trippy, ingenious and a little corny, but in a sweet way. Like Sellers' existential quick-change act of a life, Geoffrey Rush's performance is one of those nested Russian dolls: Unscrew Inspector Clouseau and you find Dr. Strangelove, and inside of him is Chance the Gardener, and finally, just when you think you've gotten down to Peter Sellers, there's ... nothing. He was a cipher, quite literally the man who wasn't there, which made for a remarkable cinematic legacy but a less than wonderful life.

PEE-WEE'S PLAYHOUSE ON DVD

Without a doubt Paul Reubens' impish, supernaturally jolly man-boy in a tiny sharkskin suit was a candidate for Ritalin, but the kaleidoscopic kitsch of his TV show was easily the best thing to happen to childhood since the invention of recess. Sure, Reubens comes with baggage. But parents can use his post-Playhouse transgressions as a teaching moment to explain the cruel and destructive hypocrisy of red state Puritanism. I mean, busting guys for spanking the monkey in a porno theater is like giving out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. What does it prove? Who wins here other than the usher on wet-mop duty that night? Certainly not the children. Besides, don't all adults lead lives of quiet masturbation?

BRIAN WILSON'S SMILE, LIVE AT CARNEGIE HALL AS HEARD ON NPR

There's been boatloads written about this ill-fated album, so I'll spare you the highfalutin chatter. But the blissfully ignorant should know a few basic facts: Smile was essentially the Beach Boys' Sgt. Pepper, the big psychedelic leap from pop to high art, and Brian Wilson more or less went insane trying to finish it in 1967. In the wake of all the overheated hype before an album that never came out--Smile will change music as we know it! Smile will cure lepers and the common cold!--a cult of Wilsonian obsessives sprung up as musicians and superfans tried to connect the dots and piece together a completed album from the bootlegs of outtakes that have leaked out over the years. Like the mysterious leopard found frozen to death near the summit of the mountain in Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro, everyone wanted to know how Brian got that high and what exactly he was looking for up there. The Smile tapes sat more or less untouched in the vaults of Capitol Records for nearly 40 years, until Wilson--now reasonably healthy and reenergized by the belated global acclaim for Pet Sounds--decided to finish it. This year's resulting Smile is, despite occasional forays into rubber-chicken dinner-theater arrangements and unnecessary add-ons, nothing short of a miracle. This concert performance of Smile is even better than the studio version, with Wilson in fine voice, surrounded by an exceptionally fluent band of new-school L.A. power-pop scenesters who manage to cloak him in a Disneyesque bubble of sound, replicating the sunbeam glories of those Beach Boys harmonies and recreating this teenage symphony to God down to the last ornate sonic detail. Sail on, sailor. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4182988

OSCILLOCOCCINUM: NATURES'S NO. 1 FLU MEDICINE

I don't know how to pronounce it either, but it's a goddamn miracle drug--er, miracle homeopathic remedy. (But "oscillococcinum" doesn't quite roll off the tongue, which makes me think those homeopaths just don't understand show biz the way the pharmaceutical industry drug dealers do.) Got this nagging head cold frickin' weeks ago after visiting my sister in Charleston, S.C., over Thanksgiving. I love my sister and her kids, but let's call a spade a spade: They're little walking germ incubators, typhoid Tommies in tennis shoes. So I come back to Philly sick and decide to tough it out sans antibiotics, trying to do my share to save the planet from the drug-resistant superbug I've been told is looming, blob-like, in the collective bloodstream of the human race, just waiting for the day it will kill us all. After two weeks of rubbing my nostrils raw with Kleenex, I say screw the human race, give me my z-pack. Run through that, feel a little better, then worse. Apparently it's viral, not bacterial. Heh heh. Somebody recommends oscillococcinum, which are these little pixie sticks of curative powder you sprinkle on your tongue every six hours. These little globules go inside and have a Batman-style fight with the germs and--biff ! bang! pow!--I am cured. Turns out some of my best friends are homeopaths. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

LOOKING DEATH IN THE EYE AND GIVING IT A HUG

I hate to bum you out amid all the holiday and New Year's tidings of comfort and joy, but pencil this in alongside Warren Zevon's deathbed dictum to "enjoy every sandwich" on your to-do list. My cousin's husband Matt--39 years old, father of three, blond, J. Crew handsome, clean- living nonsmoking sweetheart of a guy, with more good karma in the cosmic bank than he'll ever get a chance to spend--was feeling sick for weeks and finally went to the doctor. To make a long and terrible story short: He's got inoperable pancreatic cancer. The doctors give him two months to live, a year if he's lucky. Pancreatic is the worst--even when it's operable, the survival rate is something unbearably grim. Now here's the silver lining: Matt says he gonna beat it, he's gonna be the poster boy, the new Lance Armstrong, and I'm gonna believe him until he proves me wrong.

Pet Soundz

2006-02-05T19:03:00.000-08:00

DISCUSSED: Animal Collective's Feels

Back in college-which was longer ago than I care to admit, so let's just say some time after the earth cooled but before the Internet-I lived in an old Victorian house that the college owned and subdivided into separate apartments.
It was a gathering house for all the freaks and geeks who didn't quite blend in with the frat-boy-cheerleader-chug-a-lug-date-rape ethos of the main campus. Across the hall my neighbors had set up a de facto commune-some of the guys living there weren't even enrolled-of 24/7 hacky-sack drum-circling and druggy bird-dogging. They all had sophomoric nicknames-Andy Crack, Stinker, Wild Bill, Bleep-and they all looked like they lived underwater.

Almost nobody knew how to play an instrument, but these guys were gonna start a band. "Whatever you say, Hippie Pants," I thought to myself. They were gonna call themselves the Gooney Birds after the sheet of primo blotter they'd scored at a recent Dead show. While I went to classes, these guys woodshedded day and night, nourished only by an Evian bottle filled to the brim with liquid LSD.

By the end of the semester the bottle was empty and these guys were making some of the most jaw-droppingly mesmerizing folk-based psych I'd ever heard. They sounded like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey looks. Fuck me, I thought. It's like they mutated a couple steps up the food chain.

I can't help but think something similar happened to the men of Animal Collective during their formative years. They've known each other since high school. They all have sophomoric nicknames: Panda Bear, Avey Tare, Geologist, Deaken. They never show their faces in photographs, preferring to don lurid Halloween masks. From the sound of things, I wouldn't be surprised to learn they too had a private stock of that Evian elixir when they first took up instruments.

Six albums into their career, Animal Collective have become a cause celebre among the freak-folk meritocracy, creating some of the most stunningly original and indescribably otherworldly music since, well, the acid hit the punk rock some time around the Meat Puppets' Up on the Sun and Hüsker Dü's Flip Your Wig.

Let's face it-when it comes to rock music, that's when pure WTF innovation pretty much ended. Everything after, including just about all of the '90s, was music that wore its debts to the canon on its sleeve. (Grunge = Black Sabbath + Beatles. Discuss.) Even wild cards like Beck were decanting old wine into new glasses.

Truth is, celebrated freak-folkers-the box of rain that lazy journos like to corral Animal Collective into-are merely performing the old trick of reviving discarded and discredited fashions. By which I mean not so much the ridiculous Renaissance Faire wardrobes its scenesters don, but the hairy-fairy '60s Brit psych-folk of Donovan and the Incredible String Band they've resuscitated.

When it comes to pedigree, Animal Collective cover their paw tracks with six degrees of sonic separation, mutating sound over and over again until it sounds quite ordinary-if you live on Neptune.

And they have two great tricks that can't be easily dismissed: First, they somehow make music that continues to morph even when it's set in stone on CD. (I've listened to the new Feels about 18 times, and I swear to God not one nanosecond of it ever sounds the same twice.) Second, their unwavering refusal to be serious is what makes them so profound.

Extraordinary Renditions

2006-02-05T18:55:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

WE HAVE WAYS OF MAKING YOU TALK

I remember thinking shortly after the planes hit the World Trade Center that we really need to start making more friends in low places.
I was thinking along the lines of old-school shaken-not-stirred James Bond intrigue: an assassin's blow dart, silent but deadly, hitting Mr. X in the neck from behind the cloakroom curtain. Maybe a tricked-out Jag that shoots out an oil slick on the treacherous mountain passes of Monaco, sending the terrorists giving chase to a fiery death below. Worst case, we storm Osama's cave at Tora Bora, get medieval on his ass, keep our feelers out for the rest of his goons and get on with the frickin' 21st century. Admittedly, I was a little naive.

Then came the Abu Ghraib torture pics, which looked like stills from some Aleister Crowley black magik ritual: hooded seminaked prisoners wearing electrodes and dancing on top of car batteries, gay sex pyramids, water torture, genital humiliation, anal rape threats, contusions and weeping and gnashing of teeth-and other scenarios too perverse to comprehend without extensive Googling of the occult and the darkest reaches of pornography.

Secret CIA dungeons around the globe. NSA spying on Americans. Pentagon spying on antiwar protesters. And here I thought the war on terror was about defending truth, justice and the American way.

Now comes news that we're torturing hogtied terror suspects in Kabul and Gitmo with marathon lashings of Eminem and Dr. Dre at teeth-rattling volume.

This is from Human Rights Watch: "Benyam Mohammad, an Ethiopian-born Guantánamo detainee who grew up in Britain, said he was held at the 'dark prison' in 2004 and described his experience to his attorney in English: 'It was pitch black, no lights on in the rooms for most of the time ... They hung me up. I was allowed a few hours of sleep on the second day, then hung up again, this time for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb ... There was loud music, [Eminem's] "Slim Shady" and Dr. Dre for 20 days ... [Then] they changed the sounds to horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds. [At one point I was] chained to the rails for a fortnight ... The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night ... Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off.'"

Neither Em nor Dre has, to my knowledge, responded to the report, released a few days before Christmas. Both men apparently have more pressing matters to attend to: Em's finally set a date to get remarried to his ex-wife, and Dre's still gonna put a cap in Ja Rule's bitch ass.

I checked some of the Dre and Em messageboards to see if the fans had any comment. Over at DaShadyBoard, Gayme_Over started a torture thread with: "Fans of Eminem and Dr. Dre would never tell you that they are tortured by listening to rap music for days at a time." M.O.B Soldja countered with: "You are a fuckin idiot." To which Gayme_Over replied: "Go suck a dick fagget ... u a bitch nigga!" And from there it just turned into a heated debate about who exactly was gonna be whose bitch. End of discussion.

Folks, I can't help but think a dark hood has been pulled over the head of America, and we're too lost in the matrix of our own bullshit to even notice. We walk around like we're Luke Skywalker when in fact we've become a nation of Darth Vaders. Or in the wise words of Obi-Wan Kenobi: only a master of evil. Stop the Death Star-I wanna get off.

Free Love

2006-02-05T12:59:00.000-08:00

Arthur Lee Lets It All Hang Out

Arthur Lee, the outrageous auteur behind the psych-pop legend known as Love, was the hippie prince of the Sunset Strip in the mid-'60s. Love's music was a potent blend of folk, garage-punk, psychedelia, R&B and easy listening, and the band's incendiary residency at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go drew an overflow crowd that stretched around the block. Lee had enough juice to get a then-unknown band called the Doors signed to Elektra Records. He dressed the part of trippy royalty, decked out in flamboyant psychedelic dandy attire later rendered iconic by Jimi Hendrix. (It was Lee who put Hendrix in the recording studio for the first time for an early pre-Love single called "My Diary.") And for reasons that remain unclear, it was his trademark to wear only one shoe.

Not surprisingly, Lee was a freak magnet. For a time the band resided in Bela Lugosi's castle-like estate in the Hollywood hills. An early version of Love included Bobby Beausoleil, who would later become infamous for his involvement in the Manson family murders.

A combination of aloofness, hardcore drug abuse and reclusiveness--Love rarely performed outside of Los Angeles--kept the band from achieving the kind of household-name status afforded other '60s figures, and Love disbanded after three brilliant albums.

In the intervening 35 years, the adoration of Love's music has only grown more intense among musicians and rock snobs. These days Forever Changes, the third and final proper Love album, is mentioned in the same hushed, reverent tones reserved for Pet Sounds.

And while time has been kind to Love's legacy, its members have not fared so well. Two did time for holding up doughnut stands with water pistols to finance their heroin habit. One found God. Two are dead. In early 1995, Lee was arrested for discharging a firearm in the air, and with two previous arrests--one for arson--he wound up serving five and a half years as part of California's three strikes law. Lee has always denied firing the gun, and his friend Doug Thomas insisted repeatedly to the police and then the jury that it was he who fired the gun. Lee was released from prison late last year and has just concluded a critically acclaimed European tour with a reconstituted version of Love, during which he was honored by Britain's House of Parliament. Recently I caught up with Lee during a tour stop in Minneapolis, and as you will see, he remains one shoe shy of a pair.

Arthur Lee: Philadelphia? Been a long time since I played there. I think the last time was some cheese or something.

ME: Cheese?

AL: Yeah, I don't know. I'm gonna tell ya: You come see my show, you are not gonna ever forget it.

ME: I'm sure. I'm a longtime fan and this is a huge honor to finally talk to you.

Arthur Lee: I'm lettin' it all hang out, man. I'm not just standing, because I saw the Beatles, 'cause they just stand there and sing their songs. I can't say that about James Brown and I sure can't say that about Jackie Wilson.

ME: The reviews from the European tour have been glowing.

Arthur Lee: They should man, 'cause I've been sweatin', shit, in my socks. I have to change my socks when I come off stage. Sweatin' my ass off on that stage. Workin' me like a government mule.

ME: So I see that you were recently honored by the British House of Parliament.

Arthur Lee: Yeah, I was fortunate enough to be recognized. They knew all the songs. They were singin' all the fuckin' Love songs!

ME: Is it true that one of the Members of Parliament got down on his knees and did the Wayne's World "I am not worthy" thing?

Arthur Lee: He did that. He actually did that. I didn't know if that was the Last Supper or what that was all about. [His voice cracks and goes unintelligibly hoarse.] I'm sorry to say I'm a little hoarse. I did something kind of stupid, I can tell you and you're not going to print this, of course. I did something I don't know anything about in Eugene, Ore. I ate some pussy, and my voice ain't been the same since. I hope this bitch didn't have nothin' man. I don't mean to advertise NyQuil, but as long as I take this stuff, it clears it up.

ME: Do you have any there to take right now?

Arthur Lee: I sure do. I'm gonna swallow some of this bullshit right now. Keep talking, man.

ME: So you are doing all the classic Love songs on this tour, but I hear you are planning to go back into the studio in September and record some new songs.

Arthur Lee: [Long pause] I'm swallowing it right now. [Another long pause] I drank half the bottle.

ME: You sound better already.

Arthur Lee: I'm just so happy to see people - young, old, middle-aged - jumping up and down to songs I wrote 35 years ago. This new band is as square as a pool table and just as green, but one thing I know is, I don't have to worry about them overdosing or being alcoholics - they are dedicated to Love music.

ME: There is talk about you doing a tour in the fall with a string section and doing Forever Changes in its entirety.

Arthur Lee: Yeah, I'm just following the guy in front of me, my manager. I'm just doing whatever he says to become more known in the places that I'm playing. You see, I don't like doing interviews. I don't mind talking to people because I see them as a reflection of myself. I have no prejudices, but I do believe that my group has not been recognized, ever though we have been voted over Sgt. Pepper. The critics all say that we were in the top three with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Come see my show! I'm going to make sure that Love makes a mark on Earth.

ME: The conventional wisdom is that if Love had toured more, it could have been as famous as the Beatles or the Stones.

Arthur Lee: Well you can't tour with people you can't trust. That's what it was. If you guys wanna go and pawn all my shit, I'm not going for it. If I said I played Voxx, Voxx would give me a whole set of Voxx equipment and these guys would pawn it off.

ME: To buy drugs?

Arthur Lee: Yeah, that's right. I've written a book and lettin' it all hang out. A couple people in my band are dead. You should always say something good about the dead. "They are dead. Good." I always had the faith that my original band would somehow snap out of it, which they did for Forever Changes. I don't care what anybody says, that's the orginal Love band playing all those songs.

ME: Not the Wrecking Crew?

Arthur Lee: They did one song, "The Daily Planet," and Neil Young helped me do a poor production of that song. I hate that song. But I'm singing it now with these guys and I like it. I don't know. But I like Neil Young. I'm proud of Neil Young. I remember when he came to town with Buffalo Springfield at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go. I know a lot of musicians but I don't hang out with musicians. Mick Jagger sent his brother Chris by to pick me up and come visit, and I'm not into that. A lot of people have stolen the idea that I had, to be a hippie and the way I dressed. By the way, I'm still a hippie and I will be until the day I die unless I have some brain surgery or something. But I did used to walk around with one shoe on and one off and people come and copycat me and be known around the world, such as one of the greatest guitar players in the world: Jimi Hendrix. By the way, I was with his brother Leon Hendrix in Seattle. I love Leon.

ME: You have been quoted as saying that Hendrix stole your look.

Arthur Lee: Leon said that to me the other night, too. And Sly Stone, you know I don't like him. And Bootsy Collins. You know, I will never get recognized in the black community. When Jimi Hendrix died, Jet magazine wrote: "Guitarist Jimi Hendrix dies at 27, homosexual, appealed mostly to white audiences." That's what they said then, now it's all "Praise Jimi." If it wasn't for me, there wouldn't be any Jimi Hendrix looking the way he does. And Lenny Kravitz. Let's face facts: You are talking to a living legend, right?

ME: Right.

Arthur Lee: And you're proud of it, right?

ME: Sure.

Arthur Lee:Aw, you don't have to say "right." I'm just pullin' your dick. My show is going to speak for it self. All this talking I'm doing right now is one thing - you can take it and let blow with the leaves in the trees in the wind.

ME: It's true that Hendrix played on one of your early, pre-Love songs, "My Diary."

Arthur Lee:First time Jimi Hendrix was ever recorded in the studio. It was a trip - lookin' at Jimi Hendrix was like looking at myself.

ME: Bobby Beausoleil was an orginal member of Love?

Arthur Lee: Bobby Beausoleil is full of shit. He auditioned. He was a friend of mine, so I gave him some money to score for me, and he burned me. So I started calling him "Bummer Bob". By the way, it's all in my book that's coming out the first part of next year, along with a documentary and a new album. Come and see the show, man.

ME: I'm coming!

Arthur Lee: I am not out just to play music - I am out to blow your mind! For the grace of God I am still able to do what I do, and I'm doing it better now than I ever have. By the way, you've heard of this guy Bruce Botnick (producer of Forever Changes and the Doors' L.A. Woman)? He's a fuckin' homo. I could barely get my album done at the time I was doing Forever Changes cause he was hittin' on me all the time. He didn't talk about in interviews that good weed he was bringin' down to the studio.

ME: Have you ever made any money from Love recordings?

Arthur Lee: Not a penny.

ME: Not a penny!

Arthur Lee: That's the only lie I have told during this interview.

ME: You're manager told me not to ask about prison, but I can I just ask you one question?

Arthur Lee: I was convicted for shooting off a gun and the case was overturned because of prosecution misconduct and ineffective assistance of council. My lawyer robbed me and left me for dead. I was put in a place where, you know, you put your hand in and they can tell if you shot a gun, comes back conclusive or inconclusive. Mine came back inconclusive. They took my shirt. There was no proof that I shot a gun. But instead of taking a plea bargain and going to jail for 16 months and doing nine months, but instead I went to jail for five and a half years because I went before a jury such as the one Rodney King had in Simi Valley. By the way, Rodney might want to do a couple of songs in my new Love thing.

ME: He's a friend of yours?

Arthur Lee: I have never met him a day in my life. But a friend of mine happened to be going through rehabilitation and just happened to be Rodney King's roommate. So I sent him some records and CDs. So he knows about me and I know about his history. I just saw Allen Iverson on the TV and behind one person saying he didn't have a gun when he kicked in his wife's door or some shit. He got off. I had three people saying I didn't fire a gun, one actually standing up and saying he fired the gun. Doug Thomas from New Zealand. I realize the law and the newspapers work hand-in-hand and I'm not trying to provoke anyone, but I went to jail for five and a half fuckin' years for nothing.

ME: Why did they single you out then?

Arthur Lee: Because I had a couple of white chicks and was livin' in Sherman Oaks. You are about the last person I am going to tell this to, but the reason I'm telling you is that my mother, my best friend, Agnes Lee died while I was in prison. Prison was bad, but that was the worst thing that happened to me. Come and see my show, man.

ME: I'm comin'!

Now Playing

2006-02-04T11:52:00.000-08:00

M. Ward
Transfiguration of Vincent
MERGE

First, a word about his sponsor: While I can't ever foresee the need to hear a new Superchunk album in this lifetime, the label those folks have set up, Merge, so consistently releases product of uncommon purity and indispensability that it should make the likes of Matador, Touch and Go, Sub Pop and Drag City glow with the red-blush shame of the recently spanked. I tip my hat to them. And now, on with the show ... M. Ward is the nom de soft rock of one Matt Ward, a shadowy horse whisperer from Portland, Ore., who has released three albums of Jiminy Cricket porch folk and enigmatic lo-fi attic blues, each invested with a moonlit vibe that suggests there's a kind of hush all over the world tonight. This actually came out back in 2003, and I'm writing about it now because I'm officially grabbing the wheel of the M. Ward bandwagon and picking up all those dumb-butt hitchhikers who didn't think to stick out their thumbs when it came around the first time--present company included. Sublime.

December's Children

2006-02-04T11:05:00.000-08:00

How I Learned That A Garage Isn't Just A Place To Park A Car

Gather 'round children, wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown. Alas, I'm about to tell you about the Paisley Underground and how I got my mojo.
It may be hard to fathom now, but I wasn't always this cool. Certainly not back in the early '80s when I was just another Anglophilic dough-faced doofus with a sideways haircut, avidly scouring the NME for the latest post-punk farts from the ass of London. My girlfriend at the time was much, much cooler than I was, and she'd recently gotten into something called "garage rock," whatever that was, and had signed on as a Nancy Sinatra-style go-go dancer with a local garage band called the Creatures.

The Creatures, like all the bands in the burgeoning neo-garage scene, were directly influenced by Nuggets, a genius compilation curated by future Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye. Nuggets was comprised of largely forgotten or never-heard-of bands from the suburban American garages of the mid-'60s, who were desperately trying to master both puberty and the guitar in the service of channeling the Rolling Stones. Invariably, they got it wrong and invented something new in the process: garage rock.

Though these bands were criminally overlooked at the time-most were lucky to release a little-heard 7-inch before being shipped off to Vietnam-in hindsight it was the latest volley in the transatlantic cultural conversation between America and the U.K. We send over Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and they send back the Animals and the Yardbirds; we send over the Beach Boys and they return with the Beatles; we send over Jimi Hendrix and they send back Led Zeppelin. And on it goes. The Ramones beget the Sex Pistols, R.E.M. beget the Smiths, Big Star beget Teenage Fanclub, the Strokes beget the Libertines. And vice versa.

The Creatures were part of a growing American indie guitar renaissance flying under the radar of a moribund mainstream music biz, mining a rich seam of elder sounds: fuzztone garage, psych-pop, folk rock and, above all things, the Velvet Underground and the Stooges. Many of these bands were lumped under the regrettable label Paisley Underground, named after the de rigueur paramecium-patterned shirts that were the white hipster belt of their day.

More accurately, these bands were the fruit of Nuggets' loins, so it makes sense that the third and latest installment in the series should anthologize the bands of my misspent youth under the title Children of Nuggets: The Next Generation. Over the course of four discs and 100 songs, we get a trippy cross-section of largely unheralded rock classicists who labored in lava-lamp obscurity from '76 to '96.

Most of my personal faves from back in the day still sound as timeless and exotic as they did to me back in '84: the Dream Syndicate, the Rain Parade, the Lyres, the Nomads. Though I could quibble with many of the song choices or the exclusion of key scenesters like Yard Trauma and Wooly Mammoth in favor of multiple tracks by the Posies or the Barracudas, even the bands that don't taste so good anymore still had good taste.

Getting back to how I got my mojo: As if you couldn't have seen this coming a mile away, my girlfriend dumped me for the lead singer of the Creatures (I still hate that fucker). So I got myself a paisley shirt and some Beatle boots, grew out my pizza-slice Flock of Seagulls hairdo into a Brian Jones pudding bowl and started my own garage band. But that, children, is a story for another day.

Dope, Guns And F*cking In The Streets

2006-02-03T10:56:00.000-08:00

MC5: A True Testimonial DVD

Forget the Clash and the Sex Pistols. Forget even the Stooges. The MC5 was the most balls- out, super-blammo, proto- revolutionary rock 'n' roll band ever to leave a powder burn on the face of the earth. Their rallying cry was "rock 'n' roll, dope and fucking in the streets," and they walked it like they talked it--like a street-walking cheetah with a heartful of napalm. The records don't really do the band justice, and its mythos is filtered through so much dope haze, hype and competing egos that it's hard to get a clear picture of what really went down in Detroit in the late '60s. This exceptional documentary--which ranks up there with Gimme Shelter, Don't Look Back and Cocksucker Blues in the pantheon of great rock 'n' roll films--lays it all out with diamond-like clarity. Basically a paisley- shirted Nuggets'-style Detroit garage band that cut its teeth rockin' the kids at the VFW halls in the mid-'60s, the MC5's music soon amped into the teeth-rattling groin thunder of "Kick Out the Jams." They eventually hooked up with local beatnik-acid-guru John Sinclair, who radicalized them into armed pseudo- revolutionaries. They formed the White Panther Party, which was basically the psychedelic honky version of the Black Panthers. Before long the FBI had them under surveillance and some of the best concert footage in the documentary comes from--of all places--U.S. government surveillance cameras in the crowd at a chaotic performance in Chicago's Lincoln Park during the apocalyptic 1968 Democratic Convention . Like the '60s counterculture itself, the MC5 was eventually crushed by dope, paranoia, record-company bungling and 10 soldiers and Nixon coming. Unfor-tunately, the official release of this documentary is tied up in legalistic red tape, but there are enough promo copies out there that it can surely be procured on the black-markets of the file-sharing networks.

2006-02-02T05:11:00.000-08:00

Voltaire Brothers
I Sing the Booty Electric
FALL OF ROME

All the young turks who've been led like horses to water to the Detroit garage scene by the White Stripes should note: None of this would be possible without Mick Collins, truly a brother from another planet, the Prince of the lo-fi shit-rock jet-set. For the past decade, Collins has been putting out gloriously primitive super-blammo garage-punk shake bamalama under a variety of guises--the Gories, Blacktop, the Dirtbombs and the King Sound Quartet--for boutique labels operating on a shoestring just under the radar. His latest project in a career spent defining the get-down imperative is the Voltaire Brothers, which specializes in money-shot wah-wah jungle boogie, dirty bongwater soul and bubble-butt funkadelica. I Sing the Booty Electric is a bawdy black party record like the kind the Beasties used to sample. You know, the one where the guy says: "If it's gonna be that kind of a party, I'll put my dick in the mashed potatoes." Bring beer.

Life of Brian

2006-02-01T10:44:00.000-08:00

DISCUSSED: "Some of Them Are Old" from Brian Eno's Here Come the Warm Jets

So last week I'm driving down 101 South from Petaluma to San Francisco. I pop in Here Come the Warm Jets, which is, along with Another Green World and Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, part of a trio of beautifully organic art-rock albums that Eno made after leaving Roxy Music in the early '70s. The sun is setting on the rolling pastures to my left and a cottony ocean fog is slowly creeping down the mountains to my right and this song comes on. Maybe it was the combination of exhilaration and exhaustion, but I'm welling up, convinced that this is the most beautiful song I've ever heard. It's preceded by a gear-grinding electro-seizure of sound--what basically sounds like a robot dog choking up a wad of grass--and then shifts into this heavenly Brian Wilson-esque wash of gossamer sound. Can't say I've ever been to the pearly gates, but I'm pretty sure this is the sound you hear when you're standing in line waiting for your wings. Eno eschews his usual nasal snarl and harmonizes with himself like a choir of seraphim, pleading, "Remember me, remember me" over and over in a way that resonates with anyone who lives in fear of being forgotten--which, when you think about it, is pretty much the entire human race. And then he sings, "Lucy you're my girl, Lucy you're a star, Lucy please be still and hide your madness in a jar." And from there it goes into this slide guitar part that's the closest thing I've ever heard to the proverbial sound of angels dancing on the head of a needle. I kept hitting repeat until I got to the Golden Gate Bridge and to my right was the hazy blue horizon of the Pacific and to my left was the entire United States of America and to myself I thought: This is what it means to be alive.

When The Shit Hits The Fans

2006-01-09T18:01:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE WHEN THE BAND YOU LOVE HATES YOU

We all have bands we hate, really hate-you know, with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. You hate REM, I still hate Journey. There's a lot of that going around. But how many people can say a band hates them? Tin-eared soundmen, people who jack the gear out of their van while they sleep, and the played jokesters who still yell "Freebird!"-and that's about it.
And when you narrow it down to people who are hated by their favorite bands, well, it's a very elite club, my friend. Membership is pretty much down to me and Mark David Chapman, homicidal Beatles superfan. Misery usually loves company but I have no sympathy for my cohort-he killed John Lennon. Motherfuck him.

My crime? Well, I wrote this pretty candid piece about Wilco for Magnet back around the time of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Everything I wrote about-the band members forced to walk the plank, the messy divorce from Reprise and the handshake drugs that were bought downtown, as well as the fact that Wilco had became the Great American Band-eventually became a matter of public record, in the documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart and the frank interviews Jeff Tweedy gave in the wake of his rehab stint last year. I contend, your honor, that my only crime was writing an honest story about the band before they were accustomed to people doing so.

Be that as it may, Wilco hates me. I know-boo-hoo, right? Sure, journalism isn't Friendster. It's not my job to be buddies with the people I write about, but it kinda sucks when you happen to admire them.

Last year I wrote a story about the Terror Dentist, aka Anand Rao, a 33-year-old Rittenhouse Square dentist and Wilco super-fan who was visited by the FBI after somebody, possibly a patient, made an anonymous tip. A few weeks before then-Attorney General John Ashcroft held one of his curiously timed be-very-afraid-terrorists-walk-among-us press conferences. One of the cold-blooded killers possibly hiding under your bed or mine was named Adnan. And Rao's first name was Anand. If that wasn't suspicious enough, Anand is of Indian descent and, to a nearsighted or paranoid elderly patient, could pass for an Arab.

The whole thing ended happily, with the FBI agent asking Anand for a dental appointment. In the accompanying photo, Anand posed in his beloved Wilco shirt, purchased off eBay for a princely sum and rumored to have belonged to the drummer.

Somehow Wilco sees the story and links it on their website, for like the whole summer. At one point, their Web master got a hold of me, saying the band wanted to invite Anand to see them perform at Radio City Music Hall. Free tickets, backstage passes, the whole nine yards. We'd become friends by this point, and Anand thought it was only fair that he take me-or maybe I said that, I'm a little fuzzy. I definitely told him he couldn't tell them who he was bringing because it might queer the deal.

So the big night rolls around, we stroll up to the box office at Radio City and ... no tickets. Come back later, they say. The band hasn't turned in the guest list yet. That's odd, I think. It's less than a half-hour to show time. We go out front and a couple people in line recognize Anand. "Aren't you that Terror Dentist guy?"

Anand tells me he feels like a rockstar. With the clock dwindling, we agree to drop a $100 pair of scalper tickets just to be safe. We're not going to come all this way and miss the show. As we head back inside, we check at the ticket booth one last time. No dice. We explain the whole Terror Dentist saga to this sweet old lady usher, she goes backstage, finds Wilco's road manager, explains the deal, comes back with two tickets. Don't worry about the passes, she says. Just go to the backstage door after the show.

Cool, we think. We go inside, watch the show. In a word: transplendent. But you already know that, and if you don't you can check out Kicking Television, the just-out live album recorded over four nights at the Vic Theater in Chicago. How is it? It's fucking great. They're my favorite band. What do you think I'm gonna say?

So after the show we knock on the backstage door. A smiling security guard opens the door and asks us if we're here for the party. Yes, very much so, we say. He looks for our names on the list and when he can't find them he stops smiling and slams the door in our faceS. Just then this guy walks up. British accent. Looks like he's in the Strokes.

"Blimey," he says. "You're that Terror Dentist bloke, ain't ya, mate?"

Again, rockstar moment for Anand. Turns out he's Wilco's road manager and he's gonna get everything sorted. We follow him inside and up the elevator. He tells us he's got to make preparations for the party downstairs, so he's gonna escort us up to the band's dressing room. "Wait till they see you!"

The elevator door opens up, and we're deposited in the tiny hallway outside their dressing room, crowded with the band's inner circle: manager, publicist, a few Nonesuch bigwigs. I turn around and I'm standing face to face with Jeff Tweedy. Last time I talked to him, he asked me to never call him again. Tweedy gives me the hairy eyeball and retreats into the dressing room and slams the door shut. Up walks Wilco's manager, Tony Margherita, who kinda looks like his name sounds.

"I'm gonna take you guys to the party," he says. We get on the elevator and head down, the door opens and we get out, you know, to go to the party. And then we realize we're back at the backstage door and spin around to see the Tony Margherita still in the elevator as the doors close in our face. We've just been kicked to the curb. Anand was pissed. But me, I remember thinking I would die if I could come back new.

Is That All There Is To A Fire?

2006-01-09T17:51:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

How Many Strokes Does It Take To Get To The Center Of Julian?

It all started-for me, anyway-at Spaceboy. Dandy Dan Buzzkirk was behind the counter looking, as per usual, like the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary.
"Check this out," he said, before slapping on The Modern Age, the three-song debut by some band called the Strokes. It was everything I liked about Television/Velvet Underground/the Cars/Tom Petty's Heartbreakers. And the singer sounded like he was reciting the ISOs out of the back of The Village Voice through an electric razor. Every song made me want to break a window or smoke a cigarette. I paid cash.

Fast-forward past a gig opening for Guided By Voices, a drunken four-week residency at the Khyber and a star-making turn at Making Time to the after-show party at the Five Spot following a triumphant headlining gig at the TLA. All the local hipsterati were in attendance, hovering at the velvet rope that separated us from the Strokes' VIP booth.

"Fa-bree-zio!" chirped a Fresh Air producer, hoping to catch the drummer's attention. There was a tingle in the air. For a few moments we were inside the bubble, looking out instead of in. Even the haters seemed jazzed.

You can sell 3 million albums with the right pose and the right hook, they said, but there comes a time-usually after your first album sells 2 million and the second sells only half that-when sporting the right shades is no longer enough. A time when you actually have to mean it, man-if you want to matter. And that's the singer's job.

Imagine, if you can, you are the lead singer of the Strokes. Your name is Julian Casablancas, scion of the Elite Model Management founder and son of Miss Denmark 1965. Your surly slur serves as the perfect foil for the pogo-ing garage rock of your prep school pals. Your rise is dizzying. Within a span of months you go from fliering St. Marks Place to being a savior of rock, according to the hyperventilating British music press.

Now it's 2006-two albums later-and the band's grown beyond the catchy primitivism of the early days. They've built their own studio and have been, um, stroking for months. There's a whole album in the can, First Impressions of Earth, and it's very cool. All that's missing are the vocals.

The songs are like streets: Some go uptown, others point to the Bowery, some go sideways and others go nowhere in particular. Your mission, Mr. Casablancas, should you accept it, is to name these streets, give these songs a mailing address or a zip code, tell the cabbie where to pull over, which buzzer to push.

That's what New York rock 'n' roll is about: where the action is. Your job is to take us there-and in so doing prove there's more inside of you than just tinny petulance and pedigree. But when you open your mouth to sing ... nothing comes out. Nothing worth repeating, anyway.

Except maybe: "I've got nothing to say." Crooning like you're trapped inside a helium balloon or a Human League song, you repeat that over and over again. Each time it becomes a little less ironic and a little more sincere, maddening in its repetition, tragic in its waste, damning in its self-evidence.

And though the vocals will be mixed front-and-center and the distortion will be replaced with moony drollery and Cobain-ish tantrums, no matter how loud you scream, you just can't fill these songs. The price, perhaps, of being born very cool-but not very deep.

Can You Dig It?

2006-01-09T17:15:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

20 Essential Rock Snob Artifacts Unearthed In 2005

1) Patti Smith Horses: 30th Anniversary Legacy Edition (Arista)
As the high priestess of punk, Smith revived the shamanistic notion that words could be strung like Christmas lights, and-when whipped around like whirling dervishes atop three-chord garage rock-could open the portal of the ecstatic.

2) Bruce Springsteen Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Three-Disc Set (Sony)
After two commercial duds, the suits demanded a hit or else. Written as a time-lapse snapshot of one long summer night in the teenage jungleland of Jersey -- with all the urgency of a last chance power try.

3) Donovan Try for the Sun (Sony)
Deathless acid-folk from the land of peace, pot and microdot.

4) No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (Paramount)
Best thing on public television since Sesame Street.

5) Talking Heads Brick (Rhino/Wea)
All eight studio albums remixed to sound like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Just kidding.

6) Flaming Lips Fearless Freaks (Shout! Factory)
Unflinching home movie about a bunch of Okie space cadets who clicked their heels three times and wound up somewhere over the rainbow.

7) DJ Shadow Endtroducing ... : Deluxe Edition (Island)
Alchemical turntablist clones groovy Frankensteins out of the recombinant DNA of semiprecious vinyl. Nine years later beat scientists are still trying to figure out how he made this monster mash.

8) Neutral Milk Hotel In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (Domino Reissue)
This is still the king of carrot flowers. Come back wherever you are.

9) Dig! (Palm Pictures)
The Dandy Warhols' guitarist nails it when he predicts that in 10 years his band will likely be forgotten but people will still be buying Brian Jonestown Massacre albums.

10) Moanin' at Midnight: The Life and Times of Howlin' Wolf By James Segrest and Mark Hoffman (Pantheon)
Documenting the hard-time-killing-floor life of the spookiest-voiced bluesman to crawl out of the Delta ooze and walk like a man in Chicago.

11) The Man Who Fell to Earth (Criterion)
Red-haired, lizard-eyed and cocaine-thin, David Bowie plays the titular extraterrestrial in Nicholas Roeg's navel-gazing 1976 study of the metaphysics of alienation and ambiguity.

12) Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke By Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown)
He sang like an angel and died like a pimp: naked, chasing a hooker and staring down the wrong end of a gun. He was only 33 when he went to oldies heaven.

13) Various Artists One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found (Rhino/Wea)
She's goin' to the chapel and she's gonna get married and she's gonna cut that bitch Sheila if she even looks at her man again.

14) Ramones Weird Tales of the Ramones (Rhino/Wea)
Their genius wasn't that they really only had one song. It's that you can listen to it 85 times in a row and never get tired of it.

15) Johnny Cash The Legend (Columbia)
Required listening for all good Americans.

16) Greil Marcus, Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crossroads (Public Affairs)
Only a profound windbag like Marcus could wring 283 pages of hardcover sociocultural exegesis out of a six and a half minute song.

17) Rock Snob Dictionary, By David Kamp and Steven Daly
Kamp and Daly finally turn their much imitated (ahem) Vanity Fair piece into a book-length treatise perched halfway between self-serious insight and self-mocking smarm.

18) T. Rex Slider
Reissued along with ZINC ALLOY AND THE HIDDEN RIDERS OF TOMORROW, DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD, and THE T. REX WAX CO. SINGLES A's AND B's 1972-77, this is the one that, all these years later, retains its hubcap diamond star halo from beginning to end.

19) Miles Davis The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Columbia Legacy)
When Miles started dressing his jazz and Dashikis and wah-wah pedals and let it all hang out.

20) Stooges Fun House (Elektra/Wea)
Thirty-six years old and this still makes Metallica sound like pussies.

Trusted Travelers

2006-01-09T16:39:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

10 Albums That Were Drivin' My Plane in 2005

1. Spoon Gimme Fiction (Merge)
Mystery loves company, and everyone loves Spoon. Like the hooded figure on the cover, Spoon's minimalist rockscapes intrigue endlessly because of what they don't reveal: the obvious. Masters of the art of subtraction, Spoon makes subliminal three-chord guitar chug strip naked and do the locomotion, and in the vast silence that seems to frame every instrument on this record you could almost swear you hear a singalong chorus or a fist-pumping solo.

2. Bright Eyes I'm Wide Awake It's Morning (Saddle Creek)

Released concurrently with the best-forgotten Digital Ash In A Digital Urn, this was Conor Oberst's Blonde On Blonde move -- the vast sprawl of a mind wandering too fast to be trapped in just one album. Maybe that's why every show seems like Live At The Royal Albert Hall and some are already yelling Judas -- which is, of course, the highest compliment a generation can bestow on a folksinger.

3. Fiona Apple (The Unreleased) Extraordinary Machine (Epic)

Funny how the year's best un-buyable album went from a Smile-esque cause celebre to a cake somebody left out in the rain. Money talks and Jon Brion's art-fag hurdy gurdy bullshit walks -- right over to Kanye West's Late Registration, to be exact. Now I ain't sayin' she's a goldigger, but...

4. New Pornographers Twin Cinema (Matador)

Another dose of feathery Canuck-pop to tickle your melody bone. Their sound may be a whiter shade of bread but their execution is is as immaculate as Mr. Clean.

5. Wilco Kicking Television (Nonesuch)

The double live album was rendered obsolete with the evolution of seedless weed. But this one's justified because it's on the stage where Wilco has been re-inventing itself lately. With the addition of Nels Cline, who tweaks Jeff Tweedy's avant-rock curiosities with Hammer of Gods virtuosity, and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone, fluent in the scarf-rock vernacular and hair like ABBA, and laptop-rockin Mikael Jorgensen, who sends Kraut-rock sine-wave squiggles through even the most Allman of jams -- Wilco now has both their pre- and post-rock bonafides and they can still be a shit-hot bar band when they want to be.

6. Art Brut Bang Bang Rock N' Roll (Fierce Panda) Fear not boys and girls, the raw nerve of rock n' roll is alive and well and screaming its id off. Edging out stellar releases from Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand in the Anglo angular-rock sweepstakes, Art Brut's debut crackles with the sound of spent hormones and spilled beer and old Fall records. Old school skinny-tie types can rest assured: the New Wave is in good hands.

7. MIA Arular (XL)

Maya's dancehall toasts and skip-rope rhymes double-dutch over deft grime jams and prismatic click-hop. Crazy, you think. And fun, too. Like Bollywood miniatures. But if you listen closely you can hear her father's radicalism Morse coded deep into these grooves.

8. White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan (V-2)
This may not be the White Stripes album people wanted. After all, Jackn White's great talent is sounding like both Page and Plant-something no one person has ever pulled off-and with rare exceptions on Satan he opts not to get the Led out. Not that Satan doesn't have its hellfire moments of wall-pounding rock 'n' roll. There's the White Zombie garage-stomp of "Blue Orchid," the groin thunder of "Instinct Blues" and the epic shriek-and-shred of "Red Rain."But for much of the album Jack puts down the guitar-an instrument he wields like a Jedi-or at least turns down the "gnarly" knob, relying mostly on the warm, clustered chords of a Steinway piano, the occasional marimba, an alarm clock and every now and then what sounds like something falling over. After Renée walked away and the dueling marriages that followed, who are we to complain when Jack turns out a messy breakup record? And with turnabout being fair play and all, you're welcome to listen to Satan like paparazzi-to hear it as strobe-flashed glimpses of the private moments of glamorous people. On "The Nurse" (Nurse Betty, anyone?) Jack lies in his sickbed, unwittingly spoon-fed poison by a nameless angel of mercy as a warm island breeze blows in with the distant sound of marimba and shakers. Then the music heat-warps as the nurse twists the knife while chanting, "No I'm never going to let you down," and suddenly the drums sound like slamming doors or coffin lids. Mmm. Drama.

9. Dungen Ta De Lungt (Subliminal Sounds)
Sunshine supermen from the land of Vallhalla.

10. Antony And The Johnsons I Am A Bird Now (Secretly Canadian)
That voice -- a beauiftul pearl inside this oyster of a man, born of irritation, out of the sand in the bathing suit of life. It sounds like the yawp of humanity echoing in the abyss of universal cruelty. The duets with Lou Reed, Little Jimmy Scott and Rufus Wainright remind me of the scene in Fight Club where Ed Norton is bawling into the D-cup bosom of Meatloaf. Sometimes we all need a man hug.

2006-01-08T21:00:00.000-08:00

Home on the Strange

2006-01-08T18:43:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

A Dispatch From Woody Creek.

First a note of justification. I'm about to say a few words about Hunter S. Thompson, the writer, in what is ostensibly a column about music because:
a) HST was rock 'n' roll incarnate; we're talking balls the size of cantaloupes.

b) Despite the pharmacopia of substances controlled and otherwise he ritually pickled his gray matter in, he was in possession of one of the sharpest minds of the 20th century, possibly even up until he personally disconnected it with a gun to his head.

c) I just happen to be hiking in the Rockies.

Which is why I'm writing this from a patio table at the Woody Creek Tavern. Located a stone's throw from HST's Owl Farm, this was Thompson's semiprivate watering hole, and I'm knocking back a few too many Flying Dogs, a tangy local microbrew with quite literally eye-popping label art by HST illustrator Ralph Steadman.

As the sun drops behind the purple mountains, Christmas tree lights twinkle into incandescence on the umbrellas overhead and a folksinger warbles harmlessly over in the corner.

HST's widow is sitting at the next table. She discusses Dylan selling Live at the Gaslight at Starbucks with her dinner companion. I apologize for the intrusion and tell her I just wanted to let her know I've come from Philadelphia to pay my respects. She seems a little gunshy ... er, poor word choice. Nonetheless, she's gracious, grateful and probably younger than I am.

So we leave it at that, and I go off in search of the signed affidavit wherein HST promises the proprietors of the Woody Creek Tavern to never again set off a smoke bomb in the bar. It's supposedly hanging on one of the walls, somewhere in the dense mosaic of HST paraphernalia and tippling snapshots of less famous habitues.

On the night of HST's funereal moonshot, at the moment of ignition, they played "Mr. Tambourine Man," but they should have played Hendrix's "Star-Spangled Banner," because the man clearly earned his stripes.

He was a lot of things, most of them genius or at least ingeniously funny, or true in their lies, and all of them dangerous-often to himself, sometimes to others, but always to the status quo. Chaos was the ace up his sleeve, the reason God made fire extinguishers.

But above all things, he was a great American. He was part of the Great Days-before the wave broke and rolled back. A time already long past when Jack Nicholson declared in Easy Rider, "You know, this used to be a helluva good country."

And if HST couldn't quite remember that time after years of unbuttoning his peyote mind, he could at least envision it. And he would light his hair on fire and bray to the moon every day it ceased to exist-up to a point. Eventually you just say, "Fuck it. Let's go to the bar."

The final years were sodden and fallow, save for a fairly exhaustive closet cleaning, wracked with infirmity after the better part of 67 years of abuse. With his great red shark of a legend burnished and looming, he seemed aware for some time his best work was behind him, that he was a man for his season, and that season had passed.

He went out in a blaze of self-inflicted glory, his atomized DNA snowing down on pastures where the buffalo roam. I never did find that affidavit, but nowhere was heard a discouraging word as the crescent moon set on the ridge like a smile over Woody Creek.

All That You Can't Leave Behind

2006-01-08T18:28:00.000-08:00

Discussed:
Girls Gone Wild;Our New Orleans; Charlie Brown Christmas blues;The Fiery Furnaces' Rehearsing My Choir; The Future Has Already Replaced The Past

As with avoiding the words "funky" and or "gumbo" when writng about Nawlins, it's nearly impossible to write about a Katrina relief benefit album without bumping up against this ghoulish disconnect: A lot of people died; you should buy this album and party down. So let's start there.
The official death toll is 1,300. But as NPR reported last month, nearly 500 children are still missing. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. How do you assign a body count to a way of life?

It may be hard to imagine if you've seen New Orleans only from Girls Gone Wild videos, but the city was much, much more than a place to get hammered and throw Mardi Gras beads at coed tits. I'll spare you the oft-repeated magnolia-scented mantras about the Big Easy in the wake of the flood, save this one: There was no place on earth like it, which is an impossibly rare distinction at the dawn of the 21st century, when our big blue marble has essentially become the third mall from the sun.

The confluence of musical miscegenation, antebellum architecture, ancient humidity, cayenne peppa, bottomless bottles of bourbon and a centuries-old culture of corruption combined to create a forbidden zone on the buckle of the Bible Belt, where nothing was true and everything was permitted. That's all gone now, of course, washed into the sea like footprints in the sand.

All that's left behind is Our New Orleans: A Benefit Album for the Gulf Coast, an extraordinary gathering of the city's living musical heritage: the likes of Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, Buckwheat Zydeco, Irma Thomas and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, each and every one at the top of their game. I'm sure all you 'XPN types are already partying your Skechers off to this little gem of a release, so I won't waste space preaching to the choir.

To everyone else, I know what you're thinking: This is gonna be one of those supposed-to-be-good-for-you white-liberal-guilt-fests. Wrong. Half of Our New Orleans is a stone soul picnic-like there's a party in your pants, where the saints go marching in.

The other half is essentially a funeral march. Anyone who can sit through Buckwheat Zydeco's "Cryin' in the Streets" or Irma Thomas' "Backwater Blues" or Allen Toussaint's without being moved-well, we're gonna have to send out a search party for your humanity. As they used to say in my 'hood: This is some iconic shit. Like, Buena Vista Social Club good.

Speaking of which, a recent study commissioned by the Library of Congress suggests as much as 72 percent of American music recorded before 1965 is commercially unavailable. That's both appalling and par for the course-the future has always erased the past. To preserve instead of overwrite is to go against nature, which is in part what makes the Fiery Furnaces' Rehearsing My Choir so brave.

Released late last year, Choir is essentially a song cycle about the life of Furnace duo Matt and Eleanor Friedberger's grandmother-83-year-old Olga Sarantos-with Granny doing the narrating. It sounds like a bunch of kids down in the basement, firing up the old Victrola and reading aloud from family diary entries while grainy home movies flicker on the screen.

Some will hate it, but I think it has all the juvenile pathos and awkward beauty of a Charlie Brown Christmas special-all bare-ruined choirs, pencil-shaded blues and good grief. And like Our New Orleans, Rehearsing My Choir is a sandbag levee holding back the torrent of the future from washing away our most precious national heirloom: our cultural memory. Your purchase will help fill a bag with sand.

Wayne's World

2006-01-08T17:54:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

Where 40 Is The New 20, And White Linen Suits Are The New Black.

Some men are born with lightning in a bottle, and others have to catch it. I'm not just talking about the forest-fire-starting, little-children-scaring, blasphemers-smiting bolts of electricity that, more often than you'd like to think, strike some Great Plains farmer dead in his shoes. The lightning is just a metaphor, people.

Let's call it the lightning of greatness. Where does this lightning come from, you ask? Nobody knows. It just shows up on the nightstand next to the crib. It waits there, glowing like fireflies, until the onset of youth and young manhood when-because they're young, dumb and full of testosterone-the first chance they get, they let it out. All of it. Right away.

Brilliant blasts of lightning shoot across the ether, lighting a page of time for an instant and an eternity. Pick your favorite premature ejaculation: Rimbaud's Illuminations, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks. It was all downhill after that. Live fast, die young, print the legend.

Other men spend their lives standing in the rain, an empty milk bottle in one hand, a cork in the other, waiting for lightning to strike. Take, for example, a fellow like the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne. He wasn't born with lightning in a bottle. He grew up Okie trash in the dazed and confused '70s, manning the deep fryer at Long John Silver's and selling dime bags on the side.

He couldn't really sing or play guitar-still can't, really. But by trial and error and a stubborn refusal to accept repetitive defeat, he eventually willed himself into that place where the sheer power of curiosity overcomes ineptitude and greatness follows. Actually, truth be told, greatness took its sweet ol' time.

Eureka did not come early or easy to the Lips. How do you get from manning the deep fryer in a pirate costume to the man in the bubble, floating messiah-like over the multitudes at Coachella in 20 years or less? Pacing. Slow and steady wins the race.

Besides, everyone knows that when it comes to prog rock, a spoonful weighs a ton. It's a tribute to the sheer density of The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots that the band can wring so much promotional mileage out of them, maintaining buzz with a soft, steady parade of super-furry mirrorball tours, remix EPs and film projects.

Three years after its initial release, Yoshimi has just been rereleased in 5.1 surround sound. There's a new photo book Waking up With a Placebo Headwound, a new video collection called Void, and the Lips are already streaming a video for the track "Mr. Ambulance Driver" that'll appear on their next full-length At War With the Mystics in 2006. The band's long-delayed sci-fi spoof Christmas on Mars is expected to be completed for holiday release.

Brad Beesley's recent Lips documentary The Fearless Freaks is remarkable for any number of reasons you've probably already discussed, not the least of which is the suggestion of a newly calibrated rock 'n' roll clock, where 40 is the new 20. On this clock, you no longer check out at 27, drunk, high or with a gun in your mouth. In fact, you don't really get undeniably great until you're a graybeard.

That's how, at the at the ripe old age of fortysomething, Coyne has established himself as the Phileas Fogg of alt-rock, megaphoning the news from his hot air balloon that the sun doesn't actually go down-it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

2006-01-07T19:02:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

EXHUMING THE TOMB OF AMERICANA'S KING TUT

At the height of the Summer of Love, in the year of our lord 1967, Johnny Cash was fixin' to die. Men in black were no longer in fashion. It was the time of the Nehru jacket, when people were fair and had stars in their hair.
Ten years into an amphetamine addiction that started as a crutch but soon became a truncheon with which he couldn't help but beat himself unmercifully, Cash could no longer walk the line. Up for days, chain-smoking, with dark circles under his eyes, he thought enough was enough.

And so he retreated into the clammy darkness of Nickajack Cave like a dog hit by a car crawls under the house. To die. His plan was simple: Keep walking until the flashlight dies, then he won't be able to find his way out. He hiked deep into the belly of the earth, where he could hide his shame from friends, family and even the Almighty. Or so he thought. He sat on a rock and waited for death to take him. But death didn't come.

As he would tell it later, God made it clear to him that he wasn't done with Johnny just yet. There was work to do. And it occurred to him that you couldn't hide from God because God was within us. Even a sinner like you, Johnny Cash. And God guided him to the light. A year later he would record At Folsom Prison, and a year after that Life magazine would proclaim Johnny Cash and Muhammad Ali the two most famous people in the world.

How great is that? It's like red state porn. But wait, there's more. He never really shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, or did time, but he probably knew what he sang of in "Cocaine Blues." And there were more than a few punch-ups and nights sleepin' it off in the jails of Mayberrys across the South, while Andy Griffith types paged lazily through comic books and boasted of Aunt Bea's pie-making prowess.

He once got busted for trying to smuggle 1,163 pills across the Mexican border in a guitar case. In the '60s he really got into his train-hopping troubadour image, not just wearing dirty vintage cowboy threads, but packing a vintage pistol, sometimes loaded. And of course he was high as a kite.

If you ask me, Johnny Cash gives Christianity a good name. Hell, they should start a church of Cash for the true believers, the ones sometimes embarrassed to call themselves Christians. Aside from all the gangsta shit-the pills and the punches and the most famous middle finger in showbiz-the man in black was at bottom a man of mercy. He afflicted the comfortable and comforted the afflicted. The poor and the screwed over. Prisoners, Native Americans, nonunion factory workers, fat no-neck crackers at county fairs and people like you and me. Who even tries to cast a net that wide anymore?

It's all here on Cash: The Legend, a fairly exhaustive four-CD overview of Cash's career that ends where the Rick Rubin revival begins. Timed to synergize with Walk the Line, the Cash biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix, this box will be the gotta-have this Christmas season. Buy it for anyone who even remotely cares what Jesus would do. And also buy it for the devil worshipper on your Christmas list. Johnny Cash died for their sins too.

Everybody Must Get Scones

2006-01-06T18:35:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

SCORSESE, STARBUCKS AND DYLAN TOGETHER AT LAST!

There are two ways to sell out: sooner, and later. Back in '62 they sure as hell didn't sell double skinny caramel mochiatto decaf lattes with whipped cream on top at the Gaslight Cafe, the rough-hewn subterranean coffeehouse that served as Mecca for the Greenwich Village folk boom.
That little bit of cognitive dissonance will be airbrushed out of the minds of future generations starting next week, when Bob Dylan: Live at the Gaslight 1962 goes on sale exclusively-for 18 months anyway-at Starbucks.

I know, I know-Starbucks. Get over it. Think about it: A dearly departed Ray Charles sold 775,000 copies of Genius Loves Company at your friendly neighborhood Starbucks, and the one across the street from that and the one around the corner. And so on. All told, Starbucks accounted for a quarter of Genius Loves Company's worldwide sales.

Now consider this: There are 18 Starbucks in Philadelphia. How many Philadelphia record stores can you name? At this point, I'm required by law to point out that the times, they are, um, a-changin'.

If you can forget the crass commercialism of 21st-century hyper-capitalism for a moment-c'mon, this is America, you do it first thing every morning!-fork over your $13.95 to the nearest green-aproned barista, and you'll walk out of Starbucks with something far more long-lasting than a wicked-ass caffeine buzz.

Long available only in the shadowy redoubts of bootleggers, Live at the Gaslight 1962 is an extraordinary document of a time and a place, when a rumpled man alone with a guitar and a yellowing songbook of old, weird Americana could become a shining beacon of conscience.

In '62 Dylan wasn't that far removed from Robert Zimmerman, a chubby-cheeked Jewish kid from Minnesota who'd recently reinvented himself as a wizened bard of dust-bowl sadness, cowboy arcanum, humid Delta blues and sharecropper suffrage.

As Live at the Gaslight makes abundantly clear, he was utterly convincing in all those guises, wheezing righteously against the evil American gothic of the Jim Crow South, against the crushing poverty that drives a South Dakota dirt farmer to kill his family rather than hear them starve, against the war pigs wringing blood and profit out of atomic paranoia.

At the Gaslight he had them all eating out of his hand-the corduroy folkniks, the civil rights kids, the angel-headed hipsters and the stray tourist couple just off the bus from Sheboygan. In a few short years, wild-haired and wired, the ghost of electricty howling in the bones of his face, he'd turn his back on all of them at the Newport Folk Festival.

Why all this happened will, presumably, be explained with a Goodfellas-esque montage in Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home doc, airing Sept. 26 on PBS.

The accompanying two-disc soundtrack to No Direction Home (set for simultaneous release with Live at the Gaslight, but available in record stores) is another embarrassment of riches for armchair Dylanologists, as it spans his first recordings in 1959 through the punkish snarl of "Maggie's Farm" at Newport 1965, to the thunderously raw rock 'n' roll and resulting jeers of "Judas" at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966.

All of which is a long way of saying to you, Mr. Starbucks Hatin' Man, that if you want to call Bob Dylan a sell-out, well, you're gonna have to stand in line.

Black Thoughts

2006-01-06T18:08:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

WHY THE ROOTS WILL ALWAYS BE PHILLY

A friend of mine has a funny I-met-the-Roots-and-made-an-ass-of-myself story. This friend, for obvious reasons, shall remain nameless, but for sheer entertainment value, let's refer to him hereafter as Horsecock.
Around the release of 2002's wonderfully artsy-fartsy Phrenology, good ol' Horsecock and his girl went to see the Roots perform at Indre Studios. Joining the Roots for said performance was one Cody ChesnuTT, the dirty South rubber-band man who lent his Smokey Robinson-like pipes to the single "The Seed (2.0)."

Later Horsecock and his girl ventured up to an impromptu VIP after-party on Indre's roof deck, and promptly struck up a conversation with ChesnuTT. Understand that Horsecock is/was a longtime Roots fan, but at the time he was completely taken with ChesnuTT's The Headphone Masterpiece, calling it "the black Bee Thousand," a reference to Guided By Voices' landmark lo-fi breakthrough album.

Another after-party guest approached, thrust out his hand and introduced himself as Tariq. Horsecock responded with something along the lines of, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, nice to meet you Tariq, but I'm talking to my new pal Cody ChesnuTT. He's down with the Roots, yo."

Horsecock's girl elbowed him in the ribs and, out of the corner of her mouth, reminded him that Tariq was also known as Black Thought, the Roots' frontman and MC. D'oh!

Horsecock tried to cover with something along the lines of, "Oh, Ta-reek ... sure, sure, love your flow. Love it." But by then the damage was done, and Black Thought went off in search of the less clueless in attendance.

I mention this for two reasons. First, I just like seeing the word Horsecock in print. Second, it's indicative of why the Roots-despite the Grammy, the globe-trotting acclaim, the killa-dilla live rep and the white critical mass approval earned over the course of six diligently diverse and diversely innovative albums-have never been sprung from commercial death row, a life sentence meted out for the crime of failing to shake the alt-rap tag that's stuck to them like flypaper since their days at the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts.

The Roots have great taste; the buying public wants rap that tastes great. Their problem is that the drummer is more iconic than the frontman. This isn't entirely the fault of Black Thought: As an MC his formidable skills should theoretically pay the bills. He's just not enough of a cartoon: no gold tooth, no Courvoisier to pass, no big clock hanging around his neck, no bullet holes, no body count, no body armor.

Nicely anthologized in the excellent recently released Home Grown!: The Beginners Guide to Understanding the Roots volumes one and two, the sum and essence of Black Thought's words mirror Jules' famous imprecation in Pulp Fiction: "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and goodwill, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers."

Amen, right? Still, it's hard to dress those vows up in bling and boo-tay, gunplay and G-units, and sell it to horny 14-year-old suburban white boys with appetites for destruction. And to their credit, the Roots have never even tried. History will be kind to them, even if radio isn't, because the Roots always did the right thing.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

2006-01-06T11:43:00.000-08:00

Van Morrison
Astral Weeks
WARNER BROS.

My current fave Sunday-morning-coming-down album, Van's transcendental 1968 masterwork still holds its secrets all these years later. The converted need no further preaching about Astral Weeks, so it's the uninitiated I'm reaching out to here. First you need to dispense with the image of Van as the largely irrelevant pot-bellied sourpuss we know today. Flash back to Belfast in the mid-'60s: Van is winding down his tenure as blues shouter for Them--a roughneck collective of bruising whiteboy R&B and flame-throwing garage-punk snarl--ready to make the leap from drunk-up wailer to cosmic poet-seeker. Legend has it that Van laid down these songs with just his voice and acoustic guitar like one of those paint-by- numbers sketches, and that a team of crack session men fingerpainted in all the breezy jazz-blues swirl and Celtic-soul sorcery afterward--which, if true, is all the more astonishing given how symbiotic and intuitive everything sounds. What any of it means is almost beside the point. The closest analog is the luminous ambiguity of James Joyce's Ulysses in that Van was trying to evoke feelings and visions--tar-black blues and red wine ecstasies--that transcend literal meaning on their way to, um, higher altitudes

If Six Were Five

2006-01-05T18:04:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

We Got Yer Sixth Borough Right Here!

I still think we should've gone with "Philadelphia: You Comin' or What?" instead of "City That Indicts You Back" or whatever it is. But if media-friendly catchphrases really are tourist catnip, we could do a lot worse than being called the sixth borough.
Really, some of you protest too much, methinks. Would it really kill you to be so hip it hurts for 15 minutes? You don't have to believe the hype, but at least enjoy it. Like I tell my celebrity friends: There will come a day when they don't ask you for your autograph. And then you got worry.

We are living in interesting times, my friends. Not since, well, ever-but let's just say the glory days of Gamble and Huff-have technology, talent, buzz and geography aligned in such a fortuitous orbit. If we're going to be the next "it" city, we're going to need an emblematic music scene.

In the near-distant past, the spirit was willing. There was some great music, and some even got over. But most of it didn't, because the infrastructure was weak: no house label, few opening slots on the big stages and at best token access to the commercial airwaves (plus the usual corruption, ineptitude, drug problems, bad luck and life's essential unfairness).

With the recent move of the Plain Parade gals into the label business, we now have one of those vacancies filled. They recently released Songs From the Sixth Borough, a compendium of Philly indie kids covering Philly songs from then and now. And seriously, this thing is so good, I'm going to have to insist they do at least four a year.

The thing that makes this both practical and necessary is that Plain Parade is a download-only label. Now, I know what you're thinking: junior league. Maybe in the past, but now I hear the future. CD technology has gotten so cheap that even the most pitiful have their own "release." You're still looking at a few grand to start up, and I couldn't in good conscience ask Plain Parade to do that four times a year. And nobody can hear a CD if nobody plays it on the radio. And you can't buy a CD if nobody stocks it in their store.

But if you go to www.plainparade.org/songs you can hear every song beginning to end and then download the whole thing, with artwork, for a measly $8. Easy as pie and dirt-cheap to make. Most of the bands recorded fast and on the fly, giving everything a pleasantly medium-fi quality. It's like a digital dirigible of Philly indie sounds hovering over the city that anyone anywhere in the world with decent Web access can beam up to.

Look up in the sky! It's a bird! A plane! No, it's us. And this is our music. Keep it comin', I say, even if this thing would be worth twice the price with a third less tracks-but such is the messy nature of the comp beast.

Still, there are at least eight great tracks here-not just great for Philly-and at least as many good ones. I'm not going to say which; after all, I have to drink with these people. And while I could quibble with the sequencing, none of that really matters anymore.

After you download it you make all those decisions-you edit, delete and sequence to taste. You're the DJ. You are what you play. I know you've heard all this before, but this time it's really true.

Rockism And Its Discontents

2006-01-04T18:11:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

Hello, my name is Jonathan, and I am a rockist. (This is the part where everyone says "hello" back to me in a warm and welcoming fashion. What, like you've never been to an AA meeting?) Actually, I'm not really a rockist anymore; I just play one in this column.
For anyone who can't distinguish a rockist from a sexist or a fascist, let me explain. It's essentially a neutral term that's been kicking around rock-snob circles for going on 20 years. As of late it's been seized by Gen Y happy-asses to kick against the phallocentric old-boys'-club critocracy.

As such, the phat-pants kids level the term as a pejorative at geezers who can't see past rock's storied but antiquated constructs (shark-shagging shamanistic lead singer/elegantly wasted guitarist/vomit-asphyxiating drummer) and time-worn narratives (boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-starts-band-and-gets-girl-back-plus-free-drugs-and-picture-on-the-cover-of-Rolling-Stone).

These rockist guys-and they're invariably guys-are bitterly irked and utterly befuddled by this crazy modern world of white rappers, Lolita lip-syncers and dance music fashioned by annoying gay robots from planet Neptune. Wigga, please. Life's rich pageant is far too nuanced to be reduced to a narrow choice between Nick Hornby or American Idol.

First of all, the profession of music writing-or as goes the famous quote, dancing about architecture-has been brought low by years of editorial neglect, forced to subsist on a low-wage diet of beer money, free records and a pat on the head. Thus it no longer attracts the best and brightest. So there's that.

Second, the way music is made and the way we consume it has changed radically since, say, Live Aid: better hair, "free" downloads, more thongs, less mousse and Pro Tools-style digital technology that allows musicians to defy the laws of physics, acoustics and gravity itself.

As a result, pop music has become sexier, more disposable and almost without exception head-fuckingly psychedelic. (Waiter, I'll have whatever Timbaland's smoking.) And because it's largely free, we eat a lot more of it knowing full well that if we don't, pop will eat itself.

Meanwhile, good rock music has once again become something exotic and otherly-a semisecret society replenishing itself annually with a steady diet of old myths and new tones. Or an aging confederacy of dunces, depending on which side of the rockist/anti-rockist seesaw you sit.

Me? I straddle the fulcrum. I see pop music as all of the above: good, bad and indifferent. I put rock music both beneath and above contempt depending on the time, the place and the tune.

For example, I think the new M.I.A. is way more important than the new Springsteen. M.I.A. is pan-cultural (a Sri Lankan living in London who toasts like a Jamaican), ecstatic (her music is legitimately fun for all ages) and more than a little subversive (her dad was a Tamil Tiger, hiding out in the mountains as a freedom fighter).

And Bruce is, well, doing pretty much what he's always done: alternating between stadium-stuffing bar-band roughhousing and small-room, man-alone-with-a-guitar sepia-toned folk-blues-with the former being a little silly at this late date and the latter being a little dull.

Being able to make both the Boss and M.I.A. compute, I have a much bigger pillow to dream on. That's the Third Way between the specious ultimatum: American Idol or Nick Hornby-which side are you on?

I play the ends against the middle. I get off on the shock of the new, but I don't think that excuses you from doing your homework. There are more gigabytes to heaven and earth, Virginia, than is dreamt of on your iPod.

Never forget that, and you'll be fine.

London Falling

2006-01-03T18:32:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

Pete Doherty's Cracked Music

It starts with a bang and ends with a whimper. Structure becomes shrapnel, air becomes fire, people become obituaries. Everyone-even the most candyass of heart, those who dare not think in curse words let alone utter them-reacts the same way: You motherfuckers.
When the London Underground came under attack earlier this month by Islamic killbots purchasing four tickets to Allah's bootycall with a backpack of C-4, I know the first thing you thought and the last thing you'd ever admit: God save the Libertines.

There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke, and discerning laughers know the Libertines dropped some of the best punchlines since the Clash and the Kinks before them. Like the Replacements in their stray-dog prime, the Libertines raised shambles to an art form, sizzling like a short fuse during a brilliant, blurred and ridiculously fractious two-album career.

Produced by the Clash's Mick Jones, Up the Bracket and The Libertines are the sound of the live-wire synapses of youth crackling with electricity, hormones and lashings of ginger beer. Baudelaire does the "Blitzkrieg Bop."

The Libs had that ultra-rare blend of style and substance, decadence and Dior-standing in the gutter and looking at the stars. They pledged allegiance to Albion-the ancient and mythological name for England-and set sail for Arcadia, the equally mythological realm of the senses where the only law is: If it feels good, do it. Nothing can hurt you in Arcadia-not coke, not crack, not even heroin.

It was the central fallacy of this last premise-proven time and again in an infinitely repeating loop of arrests, rehab and jail time-that would be the undoing of the Libertines, splitting the band's brotherly songwriters Pete Doherty and Carl Barat into irreconcilable differences and solo careers. Barat wanted to live. Doherty wasn't so sure. "Crack is gorgeous," he said.

Doherty-porcelain pale, frail as a fairy, his coal-eyed babyface dappled with a faint constellation of freckles-went on to form the aptly named Babyshambles, dropping natty Libs-like singles on the 'Net before they went straight to the Top 10, playing hastily announced gigs to overflow flashmobs in pubs, parks, student unions and his own living room.

It was a shaky but workable orbit, and then Doherty met Kate Moss last winter and it was love at first bite. The two became instant tabloid catnip-the most badass rock 'n' roll couple since Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg. But soon the whole world started crashing down around his ears.

In the last six months Doherty's managed to add a list of high crimes and misdemeanors-including assault, theft and blackmail-to a colorful CV that already includes gravedigger, Rimbaudian thief of fire, rent boy and punkish poet laureate of Albion. Hard to tell if all the low-life hijinks give the music its convincing aura of danger and glamour or vice versa, but Doherty's come to resemble A Clockwork Orange's Alex, his ever-elusive redemption serving every agenda but his own.

As I write this, the London Underground is blowing up again, and Babyshambles seems to have fallen down, cradle and all. A summer tour was canceled, the band was fired, and the debut album, once slated for fall release, is still unfinished, according to an apoplectic NME.

Which is a goddamn shame, because now more than ever, Albion needs music when the lights go out.

Let It R.I.P.

2006-01-03T15:10:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

GROKSTER TAKES A DIRT NAP

Remember Napster? Shawn Fanning's killer application was like a diamond bullet shot into the blackened heart of the music business, leaving it reeling, and bleeding free music for years. The first reaction of the music biz moguls-men who invariably rely on their tender-aged assistants to send and receive email-was to ignore Napster.
Upon realizing somewhat belatedly you could get the Internet on computer nowadays, their second reaction was to kill it-smother it in lawsuits until it asphyxiated in amicus briefs. After kicking Napster to the curb, they sent their goon squad-i.e., the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)-after the rats scurrying in the bowels of their pirate ship. To date the RIAA has sued more than 14,000 individuals-in many cases, the parents of illegal downloaders-for copyright infringement, seeking upward of a million dollars in damages per case.

In one notable instance a Michigan mom named Candy Chan was sued by members of the RIAA. When prosecutors realized they'd have a stronger case against Chan's daughter instead, they motioned to dismiss the suit and brought charges against the kid. Sheesh, suing children-your law school professors must be so proud, counselor. Why not just give her a wedgie? Last week the RIAA bagged its second high-value target: Grokster.

"There are legal services for downloading movies and music. This service is not one of them."

That's the epitaph that currently greets would-be swashbuckling tune pirates when they pull up Grokster, one of the pioneering peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. After a protracted legal battle, Grokster cried uncle and reached a settlement with the RIAA wherein it would stop disseminating the software that made the file-sharing black market possible and reportedly cough up some $50 million in damages.

Grokster plans to have a legal paid-subscription service up and running soon, and is rumored to have forged an iTunes-style distribution deal with Sony BMG. A big black question mark looms over the future of other high-profile P2P sites such as KaZaA, eDonkey and BitTorrent that are still operating on the fringes of legality.

The straw that broke the Grokster's back was a fuzzy Supreme Court ruling on "third-party copyright infringement" back in the spring. Basically, the Court ruled that the makers of file-sharing software can be sued if somebody uses that software to violate copyright law, and it can be demonstrated the copyright violation was encouraged by the manufacturer. This essentially opens the door for holding manufacturers liable for crimes committed by the consumers of their products. Gun manufacturers must be shitting their pants.

Oh wait. Congress recently passed a shield law protecting gun manufacturers from legal jeopardy if a customer kills or maims somebody with their product-at the behest of the big guy in the Oval Office.

"The president looks at it as a matter of stopping lawsuit abuse," said White House spokesperson Scott McClellan. "We do not believe a manufacturer of a legal product ought to be held accountable for the criminal misuse of that product."

So what's the difference between making a product that allows you to share music files and making a product that allows you to kill and maim? Why, bazillions of dollars in special-interest money, of course. At long last we have government by the corporations, for the corporations. To the executive, judicial and legislative branches of the federal government, let me be the second to say: You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie.

Money Changes Everything

2006-01-01T18:40:00.000-08:00

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

Meet The New Payola. Same As The Old Payola?

Psst. Hey bub. Yeah, you. You wanna know a secret? This is gonna blow your mind: The music business is corrupt. A stinking, rat-infested pirate ship rife with graft, greed, grifting and deceit. Shh. I know, I know. I couldn't believe it either when I first heard. But don't tell anyone-especially not Mariah, J. Lo or Audioslave.
When the news broke last month that Sony BMG Music Entertainment agreed to pay a $10 million fine and stop buying off DJs if New York state attorney general Eliot Spitzer would call off his dogs, the worst-kept secret in rock 'n' roll high school was officially out of the bag.

Payola-the practice of paying DJs and radio station employees to give songs heavy airplay-has been technically illegal since 1960, punishable by a $10,000 fine and a year in jail. The term was coined back at the dawn of rock 'n' roll-a contraction of "pay" and "Victrola," those antique turntables dogs like to listen to. The first payola scandal, back in the '50s, took down Alan Freed, the godfather of rock DJs. His career in tatters, Freed drank himself to death.

After that record companies found a loophole in the law big enough to drive the Grand Canyon through: If they gave their bribes to a third party-let's call him an "independent record promoter"-who then passed said bribes under the table to the radio stations, it wasn't technically illegal.

Upward of a quarter million per song would be spread around to various flagship stations around the country, propping up sagging bottom lines and invariably used to send listeners on jet-set rock 'n' roll vacations. "You can win a trip for two to see Pink Floyd on the dark side of the moon!"-that kind of thing.

Up until last year when Clear Channel, of all things, declared they were no longer accepting "promo dollars" from independent promoters, this was business as usual. "What do I have to do to get Audioslave on WKSS this week?!!? Whatever you can dream up, I can make it happen," goes one Sony employee email message leaked during the Spitzer investigation. Laptop computers, PlayStatons and plasma-screen TVs all turned up on the desks of radio playlist gatekeepers.

At a time when indie auteurs had figured out a way to make cost-free pop masterpieces in their bedrooms and others had learned how to atomize albums and send them out over the Internet like transporters on Star Trek, the major labels were still putting an Apple on the teacher's desk. Craven ass-kissing: the sad, pathetic domain of the idea-less.

If there's any redeeming social value to this whole tawdry tale, it's that one good song became a hit: Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out." That's right, bought and paid for, alongside Celine, Mariah and J. Lo. Besides calling into question to the prevailing conventional wisdom that payola equals crapola, the news that "Take Me Out" was bribed into the charts will likely have little to no effect on the career of these great Scots.

Franz's super-excellent follow-up album You Could Have It So Much Better … With Franz Ferdinand hits stores Oct. 4. Call it poptastic, call it '80s-rific, call it the cucumber in the skinny black pants of rock. Just don't call it money in the bank.

Finally, consider this modest proposal: What if some filthy-rich lefty, like George Soros or Michael Moore, bought up the charts and stocked them with the kind of free radicals that flicker across Pitchfork's radar. Can you imagine a world where Wolf Eyes is as big as J. Lo's butt? What a wonderful world that would be.

File Under: Like Pearls Before Swine

2006-01-01T11:57:00.000-08:00

Beulah
The Coast Is Never Clear
VELOCETTE

I recently found this holding up the short leg of my couch and--shazam!--turns out it works pretty good in the CD player, too. Once the little-pony-that-could in the Elephant 6 stable of fun-trick noisemakers, Beulah has grown into a mighty unicorn, employing a similar fuzzed-pop, Brian- Wilson-in-the-basement arrangement strategy as their brethren the Apples in Stereo and Neutral Milk Hotel. Released back when the E6 scene didn't seem quite so played, The Coast Is Never Clear is a toe- tapping glad-bag of '60s sunshine pop, fun-house mirror psychedelia and kitchen sink experimentation. The hookah-smoking-caterpillar hunch of "Hello Resolven" is reason enough for any fan of late-period Wilco to plunk down the price of admission. The band's got a charisma deficit--not a looker in the bunch and, well, their name; with all due apologies to the hot Beulahs of the world, it sounds like the name of the girl nobody wants to fuck, and will likely ensure them all the riches and fame of a gas station attendant. But for what it's worth, last Sunday they were more popular than Jesus over at my place.

Diamond in the Rough

2006-01-01T04:33:00.000-08:00

SHINE ON YOU TACKY DIAMOND

Let us now praise Rick Rubin, the burly bearded Buddha-man with a Slayer jones and a hard-on for Donovan's soft underbelly, for he truly is a man for our season.
We live in a time where the once vast continuum of recorded music can be instantaneously traversed with the click of a mouse, affording the great unwashed the kind of helicopter-eye overview that was once the sole privilege of record store clerks, promophiliac critics and music-biz poohbahs like Rubin, who have the fuck-you money to buy everything and the limitless leisure time to actually listen to it all.

Not just listen to it all, but-and this is crucial-listen without prejudice. Having fought for the Beasties' right to party, having chauffeured rap from the five boroughs to the exurbs like a patient soccer mom, having added "def" to the wigga lexicon of street-smart superlatives, having opened and eventually shuttered one of the most fiercely eclectic record labels in the Western hemisphere, Rubin no longer stands on the shoulders of giants-he walks among them.

Which has made him uniquely qualified to seek out leaning towers of song-people like Johnny Cash, Tom Petty and Donovan and point them skyward once again, a penance that almost absolves him of the sin of creating rap-rock. Almost.

Neil Diamond is the latest sagging Metamucil-aged legend to get reconnected with what once made him great by Mr. Weird Beard. For anyone in utero when Diamond became a known quantity, you should know he is/was a gritty, Brooklyn-bred Brill Building organ grinder who scored any number of '60s transistor-radio classics before becoming a combed-over Romeo in the '70s, triggering hot flashes of nostalgia in postmenopausal blue-hairs everywhere. Nice work if you can get it. The man himself best summed up his yin and yang in the title of his 1968 album Velvet Gloves and Spit.

The just-out 12 Songs sounds like Rubin handed Diamond a spittoon and told him to take the gloves off. Whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, he must have said. As he did with Cash, Rubin drains all the florid pastels out of the arrangements, insisting on classic sepia tones that set off the folk-based austerity of the project.

He also made Diamond play guitar while he sang-something he hasn't done in the studio in years-ensuring that vocal histrionics couldn't exceed the needs of the songs. Unlike those celebrated Cash records, which were largely well-chosen cover-song compendiums, Diamond not only sings for his supper, but he writes his own tickets too. And his songs walk like a man and talk like a man-albeit a man in the autumn of his life, raking leaves of grass, taking stock of wild oats sown long ago and holding close to his vest a thinning sheaf of days.

The resulting tunes are nakedly intimate, impeccably arranged and tastefully transposed into the key of low. All songs are sung blue, and if there's fault to find, it's that Rubin errs on the side of drabness in the pursuit of gravitas with a capital G.

This doesn't become apparent until 12 Songs' 14th and final song "Delirious Love" (included only on the special Digi-Pak edition), wherein Diamond's solitary man is paired with Brian Wilson and the former Beach Boy's surprisingly portable palette of good vibrations: sunbeam harmonies, glee-club handclaps and Santa's sleigh bells. And just when the album ends, you suddenly wish Rubin would've allowed Diamond a couple of sequins and the occasional sip from his beloved cup of schmaltz.

2005-12-31T19:01:00.000-08:00

These Monkees Gone To Heaven

2005-12-27T01:21:00.000-08:00

Discussed:
FRANK BLACK FRANCIS
Black Francis Demo
Spinart
NIRVANA
With the Lights Out
Geffen
ELLIOTT SMITH
From a Basement on the Hill
Dreamworks

Okay, everybody who's not a member of Franz Ferdinand, please raise your hand if you're bored with the '80s revival. I see, I see. Thanks, you can put your hands down. Yeah, I knew it wasn't just me. Still, I have to say that one of my very favorite CDs released this year was recorded in 1987. The first disc is a one-take hootenanny of nearly all the songs that would appear on the Pixies' Come on Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa. It's just Charles Michael Kitteridge Thompson IV, soon to be known as Black Francis, armed with an acoustic guitar and a splash of reverb singing into a Walkman recorder the day before his band entered a Boston studio and cut the legendary Purple Tape, the Rosetta Stone of the early Pixies cave paintings. The recording session took place at the apartment of producer Gary Smith, who made pasta while Thompson sang (in the middle of "Nimrod's Son," you can hear the phone ring). The real revelation here is not just how adroitly and soulfully Thompson performs these songs on God, sex, death and incestuous union--that much would become gloriously obvious in a few years--but how fully realized they are. Thompson does double duty, sketching out his arrangements for the songs for Smith by singing the Kim Deal parts, mimicking spacey Santiago guitar leads with his mouth, cueing thunderous air drum Valhallas and even meowing when need be. He cutely announces before the beginning of "Caribou," "This is the one I want to sound like Hüsker Dü." The second disc is not the unqualified triumph of the first. It's Thompson circa last year, re-singing Pixies classics and then turning things over to a pair of Pere Ubu alumni, the aptly named Two Pale Boys, who gamely attempt to transmute classic Pixies songs into a largely guitar-less and drum-less electronica. And while Thompson's vocals are spot on, most of these arrangements are anemic and rudderless. The best electronica points out the limitations of guitar-bass-drums, but the Two Pale Boys succeed only in reminding us of the unassailable majesty of rock in the hands of the Pixies.

Sometime between Bleach and Nevermind, Kurt Cobain repurposed the Pixies' patented lulling verse/volcanic chorus dynamic to prop up the enormous chip on his shoulder during the Frankenstein-ish gene-splicing experiments with the Beatles and Black Sabbath he was conducting out in rainy Seattle. The monster would, of course, rise from the slab and kill its creator in the end. In 1994, when Cobain bit down on the barrel of a 20-gauge shotgun and pulled the trigger, he killed a lot of birds with one stone. He widowed his wife and essentially orphaned his daughter, his art and an entire generation of disciples who hung on his every word. He also managed to freeze-frame his legacy into the hallowed halls of martyrdom, ensuring that every future assessment of his work would be filtered through the grim prism of his self-inflicted crucifixion. Doled out by the keepers of his flame to re-up the visitorship to the shrine of St. Kurt, With the Lights Out is a four-disc barrel-bottom-scraping time capsule of his electrifying tantrums and territorial pissings, and when he felt like it, his seemingly bottomless capacity for heart-shaped melodicism. There are three moments on this collection of 80-some tracks that make the hair on the back of my neck stand up: a demo version of "Rape Me" with a newborn Francis Bean Cobain crying throughout; a solo acoustic reading of "All Apologies" that has the same angel-wing flutter of John Lennon's acoustic demo of "Strawberry Fields Forever"; and a filmed segment of the band in a Brazilian recording studio performing Terry Jacks' maudlin '70s soft-rock meisterwork "Seasons in the Sun"--with Cobain on drums, Dave Grohl on bass and Krist Novoselic on guitar--interspersed with home movie footage of the band members in younger days having joy and having fun, despite the growing sense that the hills they climbed were just seasons out of time. Much of this material--home demo tapes, radio station performances and early acoustic versions of classic Nirvana tracks--has long been traded in the shadowy digital chop shops of file-sharing networks, but the true value in this enterprise is that, as you read this, a runny-nosed kid eating Froot Loops out of a dirty bowl in some flea-bitten double-wide in Cow's Ass, Ind., is listening to With the Lights Out and realizing he can purge all his rage, self-loathing and ham-fisted fumbling for grace into three serrated guitar chords and a primal yowl. And one day he--or for that matter, she--will change music once again.

'Tis the season, so let's end with a bit of blasphemy: The loss of Elliott Smith is far more significant than the loss of Kurt Cobain. There. I said it. Both were immensely talented, deeply troubled souls not long for this world. Profoundly bruised on the inside, both earned the right to spend their time on earth doing the backstroke in the deep wells of self-pity. The crucial difference is that Smith's fall-back position was beauty, no matter how ugly he felt on the inside, and that will lend his songbook a far lengthier shelf life. Cobain's fall-back position was always ugliness--I hate myself and I want to die, and this is what that sounds like--and maybe one day all his angry noise will mellow into fine whine, like, say, White Light/White Heat-era Velvets. But 10 years A.D., a lot of it just seems to be rusting out in the weeds alongside unsold copies of the last Love Battery album. Quoting Neil Young in his suicide note, Cobain noted that it's better to burn out than fade away. And while that may be true, Neil also pointed out that rust never sleeps. Elliott Smith never slept much, and he too wrote a suicide note, but he set his to pretty music, and it more or less became From a Basement on the Hill. Despite my misgivings that what I'm about to say might be misinterpreted as glorifying suicide, Basement is my hands-down choice for album of the year. Nothing I heard all year came close to matching its unflinching emotional courage, brutal honesty, druggy swoon and, most important, breathtaking beauty. Smith dubbed the sound he was going for in the last years of his life "California frown," a post-Prozac update of the orange-sunshine whimsy of Wilsonian West Coast pop--sunbeam harmony, hymnal organ, infinite echo and good vibrations--crossed with Plastic Ono Band junkie confessionals that make William Burroughs' Naked Lunch look like Breakfast at Tiffany's. Yes, he was trying to break your heart, but the beautiful difference between life and art is that in art, Elliott Smith doesn't die in the end.

Rock Snob Loot

2005-12-26T23:45:00.000-08:00

The Wilco Book (PictureBox Inc.)
If you're one of those Being There dead-enders who thinks Wilco has long since crossed the line from artsy to fartsy, you might want to pass on this. But if you quietly applaud Tweedy and co.'s courage to continually tear up the script in the pursuit of creative spontaneity and musical discovery, then this is for you. It's a handsomely illustrated doodle pad in which band members wax poetic about the art of rock and the building blocks that make it possible, with essays by Rick Moody and Henry Miller and a CD of unreleased experimental tracks.

Cat Power, Speaking for Trees (Matador)
For everyone who's ever walked out of one of Chan Marshall's maddening stop-start live performances convinced she's a basket case or a fraud, this DVD proves she's something closer to the indie rock Ophelia. Without the leering eyes of beer-chugging hipsters to intimidate her, Marshall turns out a spellbinding two-hour performance in the woods with only the birds and the bees as her audience. Also includes the unreleased 19-minute opus "Willie Deadwilder" from the You Are Free sessions and a series of mesmerizing shorts by experimental filmmaker Mark Borthwick.

Benjamin Nugent, Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (Da Capo)
A quickie bio set to cash in on the first anniversary of the still unexplained death of alt-rock's most beautiful loser. Ex-Time reporter Benjamin Nugent does a decent job of tracking Smith's tragic orbit from traumatic childhood in Texas to ski-capped Portland grunger to Academy Award-nominated troubadour to drug-ravaged suicide/ murder victim at age 34. For people who like to stare at car wrecks, there's plenty of psychic carnage here. But ultimately the sad details of Smith's personal life are inconsequential in the face of the achingly beautiful folk-rock carols that came out of it.

Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster)
Robert Zimmerman finally sits down to write his back pages, and this first volume focuses on his early days couch-surfing through the beat-jazz-folk scene of Greenwich Village in the early '60s, then skips ahead to his self-imposed post-motorcycle-accident exile in Woodstock where he commences tearing down his own carefully constructed status as generational oracle, then skips ahead to the lost years of the '80s when the pilot light of inspiration goes out, and then fast-forwards again to the mid-'90s when Daniel Lanois helps him reconnect with his muse during the making of Time out of Mind. Maddeningly incomplete, self-serving, jive-talking and absolutely essential reading for every armchair Dylanologist, Chronicles is the work of a man who never claimed to be anything more than an unreliable narrator using complicated lies to tell simple truths.

Lenny Bruce, Let the Buyer Beware (Shout! Factory)
If you're in the same boat as the young lady who asked me recently if Lenny Bruce is a new band--oy gevalt!--start with Bob Fosse's excellent early-'70s biopic Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffman as the hipster funnyman turned free-speech martyr. Then proceed directly to this riotous near-exhaustive six-disc career overview. Bruce fought for so much more than the basic right to stand up and shout "fuck" in the crowded porno theater of pop culture. Red state puritans may not want to hear it, but children need to know about him--when they turn 18, of course. Because we should never forget that men have been crucified on the cross of the First Amendment. And Lenny died for our sins.

Grandaddy, Below the Radio (Ultra)
The downloadable mixtape has long been the gray market redoubt of hip-hoppers, a way to unify scenes outside the divide-and-commodify matrix of the music biz. Curated by Grandaddy's Jason Lytle, this stellar comp builds an alternative electoral map comprised entirely of sad-eyed blue state Americana, including tracks by Beck, Beulah, Earlimart, Giant Sand, Pavement and a new Grandaddy song. And this time, the good guys win.

Brian Eno, Discreet Music, Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror and Ambient 4: On Land (Virgin)
In 1975 Brian Eno was putting to tape some soundscapes for filmmaker Malcolm LeGrice when he had a eureka moment. On a whim, he slowed the tape speed and had a vision of the wordless, beatless infinite of the post-rock universe. He called this music "ambient," and over the course of four albums--Discreet Music, Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror and Ambient 4: On Land--Eno would essentially chisel out the Rosetta Stone by which pretty much all of electronica, house, techno and all its variants would set their collective watch. It's Eno's world, baby. We just listen to it in airports.

Michael Streissguth, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece (Da Capo)
This is a detailed picture book documenting the making of an album about life after you've shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. In 1968 Johnny Cash ended a five-year commercial lull spent battling his pill-fueled demons with a historic concert for the inmates locked behind the gothic granite walls of Folsom Prison. The only thing separating Cash from the rowdy throng of murderers, pimps and thieves--and surely an innocent man or two--was his trusty acoustic guitar, his cavernous baritone and a songbook that made it clear he too walked the line between sin and redemption.

Tom Dowd & the Language of Music DVD (Palm)
In the weird science of recording music, there is lightning--artists like Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie--that bolts across the ether, and there are lightning rods--producer/engineers like Tom Dowd--that draw said lightning down to earth and catch it in a bottle. As a teenage GI, Dowd worked for the Manhattan Project and bore firsthand witness to the infamous Bikini Atoll A-bomb tests. He went on to engineer the more benign but no less seismic atom-splitting of Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Coltrane, Monk, Dizzy, Cream, Booker T and the Allman Brothers. For which you owe this man, whom you've probably never heard of, more than you will ever know.

John Leland, Hip: The History (Ecco)
Sage music scribe John Leland's exhaustive genealogy of the cyclical rebirth of cool: from the plantation code words of Southern slaves, to the algebraic bleat of bebop, to the white negro beatitudes of Kerouac and Ginsberg, to the hippies, punks and hip-hoppers that came after. Required reading for all Urban Outfitters shoppers because, as Leland makes abundantly clear with his incisive prose and hepcat scholarship, it takes more than a trucker cap, an Atari T-shirt and a girlfriend with fucked-up hair to be hip. Do your homework.

Wire, Wire on the Box: 1979 (Pink Flag Archive Research)
Wire was the dentist drill in the mouth of punk, burrowing deep into the enamel of rock, at times painful but altogether necessary to rid us of the cavity creeps and their hippie plaque. Wire's spiky spartan pummel added brevity, repetition and incantation to the lexicon of post-punk. This DVD and accompanying CD captures the band live on the German television show RockPalast, performing for an audience of dazed Teutonic longhairs during their seminal Chairs Missing/ 154 period. Achtung, baby.

Various Artists, Left of the Dial: Dispatches From the 80s Underground (Rhino)
A wise man once said that everyone worth knowing in the '80s had an earring and a girlfriend who liked R.E.M. They also had a show on college radio, and these were the songs they played. All over the map--sonically, geographically and chronologically--this four-disc set comprises 82 alt-rock recording artists spanning a decade that lasted 10 years but felt like 120 Minutes. Trust me.

Bono's Not Heavy, He's My Brother

2005-12-25T00:26:00.000-08:00

Or why U-2 Does Not Suck (Despite What You May Have Heard)

Because some bands have greatness thrust upon them and other bands thrust greatness upon themselves. Because U2 knew that if they had it both ways, they could be bigger than Jesus.
Because in the early '80s, if you listened closely, you could actually hear Bono's mullet. Because the Edge figured out early on that with the right ratios of pinging echo to pealing delay, the electric guitar could build cathedrals of sound that are holier than thou.

Because Bozo-haired bassist Adam Clayton and pretty boy drummer Larry Mullen Jr. could make rock do what it does best: rattle and hum. Because in the greed-is-good '80s, speaking out about faith and hope and sex and dreams and peace on earth was a thankless job. Because U2 actually went down to the demonstration to get their fair share of abuse.

Because Jesus spent 40 days and 40 nights in the desert being taunted by the devil and never cried uncle. Because U2 went to the desert (aka Joshua Tree National Park) and were tempted by Elvis Presley and America and cried "hallelujah!"

Because by the end of the '80s U2's anthemic pieties had grown insufferably self-serious. Because in the early '90s U2 learned the importance of not being earnest.

Because Bono told Rolling Stone: "I've learned to be insincere. I've learned to lie. I've never felt better!" Because Achtung Baby was the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree, and it was even better than the real thing.

Because all the cyber-punk theorizing and dystopian consumerist burlesques of the PopMart tour were dead-on, even if the songs were not.

Because 9/11 turned back the clock on the promised 21st-century hypercapitalist utopia of a free-range chicken in every pot, an SUV in every garage and high-speed wireless everywhere in between. Because it's no longer too late, tonight, to drag the past out into the light. Because on that soft September morn, we were harshly reminded of all that we can't leave behind.

Because despite all that, sometimes even new messiahs have to put down the weight of the world, look up at the sky and notice that, hey, it is a beautiful day, and then step back and let the Edge take it from there. Because during the Elevation tour, U2 reapplied for the job of best rock 'n' roll band in the world, aced the interview and got hired.

Because How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb proves that U2's new sincerity is the same as the old sincerity, only better. Because if the Nuggets-meets-War garage-shake-bamalama of "Vertigo" doesn't completely rock your world, we seriously need to send out a search party for your groove thang.

Because when Bono sings, "The boys play rock 'n' roll/ They know that they can't dance" and follows it up with "at least they know," well, pardon my French, but that's fuckin' funny. Because U2 should be doing commercials for Apple. Because I dare you to name two other artsy commercial entities with their combined mega-unit-moving stature that are quantifiably trying to change things for the better.

Because, as Bono sings on "Miracle Drug," "freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby's head," and don't let anyone, not even the president of the United States, tell you that some people hate the scent of a newborn baby's head.

Because only a fool would try to save the world, and Bono was fool enough to care--and God bless him for giving it the old college try.

Because Bono was willing to sleep with the devil if he could lift the boot of world debt off the necks of the dying. Because, as the man sings from behind those ever-present blue-state-tinted shades, where you live should not determine whether you live or die.

Because "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own," and we all need something to lean on--be it God, dope, rock 'n' roll or your father's deathbed.

Because, in the words of Max von Sydow's character in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, "If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up." Because Bono recently told The New York Times: "I don't talk about my faith very much, because the people you might want to talk with, you don't want to hang out with."

Because we live in a time when religion is no longer, in Karl Marx's famous estimation, the opiate of the masses--it's the crack cocaine. Because U2 knows that the last thing the world needs right now is more cocaine.

Because what the world needs now, in the words of another philosopher, is love sweet love. Because only love can dismantle an atomic bomb, and no band on earth has a bigger, more immaculate heart than U2.

Because you can snort, you can scoff, you can even hate on them, but you simply cannot deny that they come in the name of love.

Riddle Me This

2005-12-25T00:16:00.000-08:00

Reckoning ÷ Crooked Rain Crooked Rain = Around the Sun?

Twenty years ago--let's just pause and think about that for a sec, 20 years ago--R.E.M. released Reckoning. It was the much-anticipated sophomore release by the underground's then-favorite sons of the South. The album made good on the kudzu-crusted promise of the band's bewitching and ultimately confounding debut Murmur, radiating a murky but hopeful aura to an alt-world grown weary of punk's safety-pinned doom and goth's spider web of gloom.
"I'm the sun and you can read," they sang, or at least that's what it sounded like--you never knew for sure back then, and that proved to be an awful lot of their charm. And in the jingle-jangle morning of Reagan's America, we came following them.

Reckoning was full of secret maps and sepia-tinted legends, the autumnal ring of Rickenbacker guitars and the mesmerizing moon-river moan of Michael Stipe, delivering the promised fables of classic rock's stylistic reconstruction to a post-punk world of shattered expectations, asymmetrical haircuts and skinny black pants.

Reckoning contained multitudes, alluding to the Byrds and the Velvet Underground, mining the backwoods mysticism of Southern folk art and wedding it to love-beaded mid-'60s folk rock to create a new atlas of blue-highway Americana. All across the nation, red-eyed sophomores clustered Indian-style around the dim glow of dorm-room lava lamps, separating seeds from stems, trying to decipher Stipe's cryptic utterances.

Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg were two of those stoned sophomores passing the peace pipe in the warm wigwam of early-'80s college radio. A photogenic pair of smart-alecky sun-kissed California boys turned indie rock hobbyists, Malkmus and Kannberg put down the soccer ball and picked up guitars, bestowing cryptic nicknames on each other--S.M. and Spiral Stairs, respectively--and trafficking in noise and ambiguity to fill the void of melody and hooks that were still some years in the offing.

Recording under the nom de rock Pavement, they released a pile of spazzy, dust-bunny-on-the-needle 7-inch singles, culminating in 1992's Slanted and Enchanted, a bewitching but ultimately confounding debut that resonated with lo-fi crackle, hiss and pretty pop, not to mention jigsaw-puzzle visions of summer babes, fruit-covered nails and Loretta's scars.

Slanted and Enchanted made Pavement the toast of indieland, and the rock literati soon dubbed its boyish members--with their precisely wrinkled shirt tails, stoner smirks and deep-well knowledge of rock-snob ephemera--alt-rock's most elegant and eligible bachelors.

In 1994--having switched coasts, trading suburban California sun for miles and miles of New York style--Pavement released Crooked Rain Crooked Rain, the much-anticipated sophomore LP by the underground's then-favorite sons of the city.

Shockingly tuneful and self- assured, Crooked Rain contained multitudes, alluding to the Fall and R.E.M., mining the majesty of rock and cutting it with irony, enigma and slacker ennui to create a new covenant for a Lollapalooza nation growing increasingly weary of the macho gigantism of grunge's vein-popping flannel angst.

"Songs mean a lot when songs are bought, and so are you," Malkmus sang. All across the nation, red-eyed sophomores clustered Indian-style around the dim glow of dorm-room lava lamps, separating seeds from stems, trying to decipher Malkmus' cryptic utterances.

Fast-forward to 2004. Pavement has long since disbanded into thirtysomething adulthood, elusive solo careers (or Korea, if you prefer) and horse-race handicapping. Matador has begun releasing 10th-anniversary bonus-track reissue editions of Pavement's early canon. Following 2002's Slanted reissue comes the snazzy Crooked Rain version 2.0, complete with all the attendant B-sides of the era and 25 unreleased tracks of beer-soaked basement jams, high-guy odes to Smile-era Beach Boys and the Jesus and Mary Chain, cool demo takes of Crooked tunes and embryonic versions of songs that would wow on Wowee Zowee, the album that came after.

Ten years later not one drop of Crooked Rain's hook-filled charm has evaporated. The elbows thrown at Stone Temple Pilots and Smashing Pumpkins, which raised hackles back in the day when the indie-vs.-major-labels debate had the suicidal intensity of a jihad, now seem as harmless as the Pavement boys always insisted. I mean, really: Billy Corgan? Scott Weiland? Like I could really. Give a. Fuck.

And "Range Life," the rollicking country rocker from which those aforementioned elbows were thrown, emerges as Pavement's defining moment, a reminder of a time when Malkmus' obfuscating snark and grad-student sarcasm burned off like morning fog to reveal a shining path of sincerity. That's foxy to me--is it foxy to you?

Included in those Crooked Rain bonus tracks is a B-side ode to R.E.M. called "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence," in which Malkmus intones the names of songs from Reckoning. There is also a squint-and-you-can-recognize-it pisstake of Reckoning's twilight mood-piece "Camera."

Thankfully, 20 years into an impressive career in rock, R.E.M. doesn't sound nearly as shambolic, but the new Around the Sun finds the band sounding a little weary from the chores of enchantment. With the late-20th-century departure of charter drummer Bill Berry, R.E.M. has carried on as a "three-legged dog," as Stipe famously put it.

Aside from the intriguing foray into electronic ambience and Pet Sounds exotica of 1999's post-Berry Up, you could be forgiven for concluding, based on the albums that came after--the flat-soda pop of 2001's Reveal and the unrelentingly midtempo mopery of the just-out Around the Sun--that the dog don't hunt so good anymore.

Once you get past the lovely, elegiac folk-pop of the album-opening "Leaving New York," Sun's first single, things bog down quickly. Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of Stipe, who lost his Delphic aura back in the late '80s when he traded incantation for clarity and you could actually make out what the hell he was singing.

I liked him better when he just pretended to be deep instead of actually trying to be. Too many songs on Sun--all tastefully colored with piano tinklings, keyboard washes and gilded folk pluck, mind you--sound like the working script to some bad Sofia Coppola movie in which the hip young protagonists languish melancholically in fading romances set against an international jet-set backdrop of high-speed trains and chic restaurants. "Your rope trick started looking stale," sings Stipe on "Boy in the Well," and he could well be singing to the man in the mirror.

I've seen R.E.M.'s world up close, and it's all five-star hotels that recycle and solar-powered limousines. And I'd never begrudge those guys the right to get stinkin' rich from the high art they were capable of transmuting rock into when they were at the height of their powers--or even just stinkin' drunk on airplanes. But they're millionaires locked in a bubble of climate-controlled luxury, long removed from the heat and friction of ordinary lives that make for music worth listening to.

In the end you have to choose between the mansion on the hill or the art in the streets. And the only time the twain shall meet is when art is hung over the sofa in the mansion on the hill. That's a gross overstatement, of course, but that doesn't change the fundamental fact that when you get to a certain tax bracket and the zip code that comes with it, you can't go back to Rockville again.

Ryan's Hype

2005-12-24T17:12:00.000-08:00

Ryan Adams
Love Is Hell, Pt. 1
Love Is Hell, Pt. 2
Rock N Roll

My fantasy Paris Hilton porno tape is a never-ending security cam loop of the bottle-blond heiress working behind the counter of a 7-Eleven. No nudity, no sex--just her ringing up Twinkies and cigarettes and doling out Lottos in grainy black-and-white, humbled by the indignity of earning an honest, modest living. Now that would be hot.

I'm pretty sure there's a market for a similar tape starring Ryan Adams. Like Paris, Adams is famous for reasons that remain unclear to most--he was 21 Across in a recent New York Times crossword puzzle, doncha know--and as such he engenders a fair amount of resentment. Fact is, he comes with a lot of baggage, a lot of talent and more than his fair share of bullshit.

There's the "Cobain of alt-country" tag, pressed on him like a Post-It by British wags when he was drinkin' and druggin' Whiskeytown--his '90s roots-rock band of beloved shoulda-beens--into oblivion.

There's the zigzag wanderlust that's taken him from New York to Nashville to Los Angeles and back, leaving behind piles and piles of dirty laundry for journalists to sort through and fold in damning piles.

There's the trail of alternababes--Winona, Alanis, Beth Orton--he's been attached to long enough to make the gossip pages, the comely memory of each one consigned behind a velvet rope in the VIP room of his hungry heart.

And then there are the songs he's written about all of the above, which is why we are gathered here today on page 28.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Ryan Adams is guilty of many sundry misdemeanors--marriages of convenience, self-aggrandizing mythology and, at times, infidelity to his own talent--but if his greatest crime is being a passionate man, let him be guilty.

Exhibit A is Love Is Hell, an album recorded in studios in New York, New Orleans and Los Angeles with John Porter, a producer noted for his work with the Smiths, a band near and dear to Adams' heart.

An idiosyncratic collection of streetlight piano weepers, strummy high-lonesome range rovers and husky-voiced Hatful of Hollow pastiches, Love Is Hell was recorded during Adams' residency at New York's storied Chelsea Hotel, the ornate boho flophouse that people go to in search of poetry and danger or a reputation for both.

"Taking bullets for a team of bad poets/ How is it up there?" he sings on the excellent "City Rain, City Streets," eulogizing the vapor trail of crushed romantics stretching across the ether from Parsons to Poe. Somewhere in the middle he slips in an acoustic cover of Oasis' "Wonderwall," making Noel Gallagher's dark horse Beatle ode sound like a coked-up paranoid trapped inside the Hotel California. You can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave.

For the most part, Love Is Hell plays to Adams' strength: the slightly blurred, faintly rustic midtempo art song.

Unfortunately, music biz marketing honchos and radio programmers look at a collection of slightly blurred, faintly rustic midtempo art songs and see a cake someone left out in the rain. They like their cakes with cleanly etched icing and candles burning brightly.

And so, when Lost Highway heard Love Is Hell, they sent Adams back to the drawing board with the simple proviso: Hey kid--rock 'n' roll. A deal was struck: Give us something we can get on the radio--critics' darlings don't ship gold, kid, and good press don't keep the lights on--and we'll put out your little art record as two EPs with no promotion.

Last August Adams locked himself in a New York studio with ex-Courtney Love paramour James Barber behind the board and in just 23 days cranked out Rock N Roll. Unfortunately, Adams is least convincing when he swings for the fences and writes for the radio programmers--witness the Bud Light in a can of 2001's Gold.

And for a guy who's been known to throw temper tantrums onstage if some heckler mockingly calls out "Bryan Adams" between songs, he really shouldn't stoop to "Summer of '69" bar-band shtick, even if an impossible deadline is looming.

"Everybody's cool playing rock 'n' roll/ I don't feel cool at all," he sings on the title track. Somehow I don't believe that. That people working behind the counter at the 7-Eleven don't feel cool at all? That I believe.

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things

2005-12-22T01:57:00.000-08:00

Elliott Smith, 1969-2003.

Near the end of The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson's storybook cinematic fable of wasted potential, the character of Richie, a disgraced world-class tennis player with a dark secret, looks soulfully into the bathroom mirror. It's impossible to say what he's thinking--he looks scared, confused, angry, on the verge.

A tensely strummed acoustic guitar spirals in the background, accompanying a hushed, faintly ominous vocal. It's Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay." Richie picks up a scissors and methodically, if crudely, crops his shoulder-length tresses down to the scalp. He lathers up his lumberjack beard and shaves it clean. He stares hard in the mirror, unblinking, trying to recognize the face he sees.

The music swells, whispery and unnerving. He nods slightly, pops the blade out of the razor and slashes his wrists. In the end, Richie Tenenbaum is saved.

Elliott Smith was not.

Last week he was found in his apartment in Los Angeles, dead from a self- inflicted knife wound to the chest. Sad to say, deep down nobody who knew him is really all that surprised. He lived in an orbit of despair, and he bore all the usual scars: inconsolable depression, unshakeable addictions, suicidal tendencies.

He was not a pretty man, but his music could win beauty contests. Over the course of five albums, he managed to channel a profound sadness into aching, velveteen folk-rock carols. The best of them sound like mercy itself. Eerily, his entire songbook sounds like a cry for help: harrowing, deeply wounded lyricism wrapped in gorgeous lullaby melodies.

That phrase--"a cry for help"--seems so obvious and cliched I'm embarrassed to type it. But that doesn't diminish its tragic license for truth. What makes a man plunge a knife into his chest? What makes a man jump off a bridge? Or stick a needle in his arm?

The short answer is as obvious as it is cliched: to relieve unbearable pain. That much is undeniable, and yet it explains almost nothing. As old as life itself, suicide remains the cruelest existential riddle. A surrender to the void, a fuck-you to the world. A desperate peace wrested from ordinary horror.

I don't pretend to know Elliott Smith, but I spent a week with him on tour and at his home back in 2000 when I was profiling him for Magnet magazine. From the outside he looked like the same badly drawn boy you saw peeking shyly out of the scores of high-profile magazine portraits that ran around the time he was nominated for an Academy Award for his song "Miss Misery" from Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting. He was wearing that same brown ski cap he always wore--the one that cocooned him from the world's harsher frequencies.

At the tail end of a months-long tour in support of his last album, Figure 8, he looked tired and thin. His long hair, unwashed for days, framed his ravaged face. I wrote that he looked like "Christ after three days on the cross." A bit dramatic, perhaps, but no less accurate.

He played me a new song he'd just recorded. In retrospect, the irony of the title is tragic bordering on the grotesque. It was called "A Dying Man in a Living Room."

So much of his art--bits of lyrics, album cover imagery--was a muted blare of distress. The cover of his second album, simply titled Elliott Smith, featured two people jumping off the roof of a building.

Elliot Smith was a very damaged soul. His childhood was rough, a fact underscored by his unwillingness to talk about it.

"There's not much I could say about that time that I would like to see in print," he said when I asked him about growing up. "I wouldn't want to remind any of the people involved of that time."

By his early 20s, during the flannel glory days of the early '90s Pacific Northwest, he was playing guitar in a Portland grunge outfit called Heatmiser. After three albums he quit the band, because, he told an interviewer, when you grow up around a lot of yelling and screaming, the last thing you want to do is be in a band where everyone's yelling and screaming.

He struck out on his own, making music that was the polar opposite of grunge: delicately acoustic, painfully introspective, full of flickering-candle reverie and blurred visions of personal disintegration. With each album, his audience grew--swelling with legions of crushed romantics, the desperately lonely and the clinically sad. Some listened to remember, some listened to forget.

By the time Gus Van Sant showed up, Smith had been crowned indie's sun king of rainy mood-pop. And yet even as his profile rose, he was collapsing inside. He seesawed up and down between heroin and alcoholism, full-blown depression and tenuous recovery. "Shoot me up/ It's my life," he sang with brutal honesty.

Friends staged interventions. There were hospitalizations. At some point, he told me, aided by Paxil, he simply willed himself back into the light with this personal mantra: Things are going to work out and I am never going to stop insisting that things are going to work out.

On the last day I spent with Smith, we sat outside his bungalow, tucked away in a leafy section of Silver Lake. I asked him a lot of pretentious big-picture questions about love and death and God. At one point, I asked him if he thought suicide was courageous or cowardly.

"It's ugly and cruel and I really need my friends to stick around, but dying people should have that right," he said. "I was hospitalized for a while and I didn't have that option and it made me feel even crazier.

But I prefer not to appear as some sort of disturbed person. I think a lot of people try to get a lot of mileage out of it, like, 'I'm a tortured artist' or something. I'm not a tortured artist, and there's nothing really wrong with me. I just had a bad time for a while."

Even then, I could tell he didn't really believe that. It sounded like whistling past the graveyard.

In the two years since I spent time with Smith, I'd heard discouraging things: that he had fallen off the wagon--hard. That his manager--widely seen as one of the pillars of his sobriety--had given up on him and moved on. That his record company passed on his new album, supposedly titled From a Basement on the Hill.

His people still loved him, though. He sold out the Trocadero back in June without having released an album in three years. A few weeks ago he released a limited-edition 7-inch on the Seattle-based Suicide Squeeze label which contained two songs: "Pretty (Ugly Before)" and--again, in retrospect, this is about as subtle as writing "redrum" on the mirror in lipstick--"A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free." That's a long way from "things are going to work out and I am never going to stop insisting that they are going to work out."

Last week things did not work out. I don't know if he stopped insisting that they would, or he stopped believing what he was saying. Either way, 34 years was all he could stand and he couldn't take any more. We have to respect that. After all, he made it clear from the very beginning: Sooner or later the world will break your heart.

Anarchy in the A.C.

2005-08-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

Okay Mr. Punk Friggin' Rock. Before we even get started, you need to come down off your high horse. Take it slow, big fella. You're not as young as you used to be, and it's a long way down. All right, both feet on the ground? Good.
Yes it's true, the Sex Pistols played at the Donald's Trump Marina casino on Saturday night, and you know what? They rocked, without apology. Like they meant it, man.

At this late date--some 25 years removed from the filth and the fury of their snot-caked birth--what more could you ask of them? Reasonable ticket prices? Maybe. Tickets did top out at $70 with taxes and handling fees, which is a fuck of a lot more than the three quid you would have forked over to gob them at London's Hope and Anchor back in the day.

But hey, this is the 21st century, and after the cable industry, the concert business is about as close as you come to legalized consumer rape. Blame Ticketmaster. Blame Clear Channel. Hell, blame the Eagles. They started the whole $70 ticket thing.

Personally, I can't fault the Pistols for wringing a little retirement nest egg out of their myth. Not when the entire Epitaph roster is using the buzz-saw power chords of "God Save the Queen" like an ATM card.

A less cheesy venue? Nah. It made perfect sense for the Pistols to come out of retirement rattling the dentures of the blue hairs pumping the slots with their Social Security checks. Really, who else is gonna be shocked anymore?

Not to tour at all? To keep the corpse of their vaunted legacy forever young and pretty, embalmed and out of public view? Too late. Johnny Rotten and co. already abused that illusion when they reunited in 1996 for the Filthy Lucre tour.

Besides, all the mohawked doofuses bitching into their beers about how the Pistols reunion is somehow tarnishing their legend are projecting a purity on the band that never really existed. They are forgetting that this is the group that swindled the record industry out of a quarter of a million pounds before they released a single note of music.

The fact that all that filthy lucre wound up lining the pockets of Malcolm McLaren, the Pistols' svengali manager, is a whole other story, but it also goes a long way toward explaining why they would cash in now. The other part of the explanation is that--like Dylan, Jagger, Richards and for that matter R.E.M.--what the hell else are they going to do?

They are, despite their protests to the contrary back in the day, musicians, and the last time we checked, musicians played music. Get over it.

So there we are Saturday night at the Trump Marina's not-quite-full Grand Cayman Ballroom amid a crowd of postpubescent Warped Tour refugees looking for the real thing and Harvey Pekar look-alikes in faded Union Jack T-shirts trying to remember it--along with the usual smattering of drunk Jersey assholes and a contingent of beerhounds in shamrock green T-shirts that read "KISS ME I'M SHITFACED."

"For those about to die, we salute you," says Rotten, mocking his bandmates' fiftysomething decrepitude, as the Pistols take the stage and lurch into the serrated chords of "Bodies."

Rotten looks hale and healthy in a sleeveless tartan smock and cargo shorts, presumably having hit the StairMaster since his fat bastard appearance onstage in London in 1996. His adenoidal sneer of a voice still intact, he goosesteps across the stage, glaring wild-eyed, neck veins popping, spitting, shooting boogers and cussing like a sailor at last call.

The former anti-Christ actually seems to be enjoying himself. Still the same rude thumb up the ass of the Establishment he always was, bless his heart, Rotten mocks his titular host ("Donald Trump, you've got a dump") and the powers that be ("Bush? You don't need that idiot").

All these years later, anger is still his energy. The yahoo who thinks "punk rock" means throwing your drink on the lead singer only stokes Rotten's furnace.

Steve Jones looks like he's been overstaying his welcome at the all-you-can-eat buffet in his spare time, but his guitar playing packs the same razor-wire edge that gave Never Mind the Bollocks its napalm fury. Drummer Paul Cook hits the drums like they owe him money. And charter bassist Glen Matlock--sacked midway through the Pistols' two-year career and replaced by the now-dead, more-idiot-than-savant Sid Vicious--delivers the requisite pogo stick gallop.

For the next 60 minutes they take a proud victory lap through Bollocks' undiminished greatness, with a brief detour through the Stooges' "No Fun," and if they don't sound quite as apocalyptic as they surely must have in 1977 it's only because the din of the culture has grown louder and coarser in the intervening years.

"God Save the Queen" and "Anarchy in the U.K." still make you want fuck shit up, or at the very least flip that two-fingered British version of the bird. The old guard gets the warm nostalgia glow they always swore they would never want, and when it comes they're glad for it.

In the end you can rest assured that more than a few kids filtered back to the suburbs and started a band that very night. And that, Mr. Punk Friggin' Rock--more than the overthrow of the status quo, the safety pins, the purple mohawks, the bondage trousers, Situationist manifestos or any quasi-socialist Maximum Rock 'n' Roll pieties--is what it's all about.

Decades Under The Influence

2005-02-06T12:25:00.000-08:00

My Surefire Predictions For The Future

Every generation gets the future it deserves--which, with precise karmic symmetry, usually works out to be a revival of the decade 20 years prior to the present.
Like clockwork, the decade 20 years past is retrieved from the dustbin of history and embraced, semi-ironically, as a totem of wet-eyed nostalgia for those who survived it and a gauche treasure chest of kitschy exotica for those too young to have actually experienced it.

In the '70s, it was the '50s, with Happy Days and oldies sock-hops. In the '80s, it was the '60s, with The Big Chill and hipsters sporting paisley shirts and love beads. In the '90s, it was the '70s, with That '70s Show, disco nostalgia and the return of the bellbottom. Currently, we are reviving the '80s, the decade when pants were small and hair was big. God help us. Please.

The '90s revival is looming, and when it's discovered that the '90s were really the '70s, the shit is really going to hit the fan. Pop culture's Wayback Machine will accelerate into hyperdrive. Soon we'll become nostalgic for last year, then last month, then last week and then five minutes ago--until we become nostalgic for the present.

This will cause a cataclysmic disruption in the space-time continuum that will trigger the apocalypse. Dark clouds will loom on the horizon and a ghostly wind will blow across the earth. There will be fire and floods and famine and a black female Republican in the White House.

Suddenly, the four horsemen will appear in the distance. They'll be four impeccably groomed gay men and they'll make fun of your clothing, haircut and tastes in interior decorating. And that's how it will end--not with a bang or a whimper, but a makeover. And then the future will begin.

Here's what you can expect:

IN THE FUTURE EVERYONE WILL BE ANONYMOUS FOR 15 MINUTES.

Thanks to affordable home recording and CD-burning equipment and the DIY ethic getting way out of control, we will all be pop stars. And nobody will care. The demographic math of fame will invert itself.

Instead of a select few achieving pop royalty and reveling in the adulation of the masses, millions will be famous and a select few will envy and emulate them--probably just your girlfriend and your mother. But even that is not a given; your mother might also be a pop star and far too busy with her own career to care about yours. Her name is Madonna.

IN THE FUTURE, HEAVY METAL WILL BE NICE.

Forsaking the dark side of drug abuse, degeneracy and the devil, future legions of metalheads will release albums of super-lovey-dovey songs of love and hope with keening harmonies and jangling guitars.

Think the Beach Boys with mullets and AC/DC T-shirts giving the two-fingered devil horn salute. Wouldn't it be nice?

IN THE FUTURE, WHITE WILL BE THE NEW BLACK.

White people will be the only ones making rap music--and it will sound like Barenaked Ladies. Expect WXPN to switch to an all-rap format. Looking to turn the tables on white people for co-opting their music, the likes of 50 Cent and Beanie Sigel (having long since been released from prison) will dress in matching V-neck sweaters, strum acoustic guitars and sing goofy early-'60s folk songs in the tradition of A Mighty Wind. And it will be the shizzle.

IN THE FUTURE, ONLY ROCK CRITICS WILL PAY FOR MUSIC.

Despite increasingly heavy-handed tactics by the RIAA against illegal music downloading--think SWAT teams kicking down the bedroom doors of 12-year-old file sharers--online trading of music will continue to thrive, rendering the market value of recorded music to a zero sum.

Rock critics, being a reactionary lot--witness their fetishization of vinyl and album art you can hold in your hands--will insist on forking over cold cash for music, just, you know, for old times' sake.

IN THE FUTURE, INDIE ROCK WILL FILL STADIUMS ...

... with aged hipsters that have long since given up on music and redirected their record-buying money into NFL season tickets. The inability of anybody over the age of 22 to grasp what the big frickin' deal is with Dashboard Confessional will be remembered as the tipping point that turned music consumers into rabid sports fans.

IN THE FUTURE, 1966 WILL STILL BE REMEMBERED AS THE COOLEST YEAR IN ROCK.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, do your homework.

IN THE FUTURE, BRITNEY SPEARS WILL BE CONSIDERED AVANT GARDE ...

... by jaded twentysomething hipsters in Williamsburg looking for the next hopelessly uncool thing to render impossibly cool, having finally figured out that electroclash, like, actually sucks.

IN THE FUTURE, PEOPLE WILL FINALLY FIGURE OUT THAT MTV IS THE MATRIX.

Think about it.

IN THE FUTURE, BOB DYLAN WILL STILL BE ON TOUR.

Until the day he's caught in a downpour at an outdoor concert and starts to vibrate, wheeze and sputter incomprehensibly. At first, everyone in the audience will mistake this for yet another "genius" reworking of his back catalog--until smoke comes out his ears and sparks shoot out his nose. And then, like that scene in Westworld, his face will fall away to reveal a shocking cyborg mask of wires and circuit boards. The crowd will go wild.

IN THE FUTURE, MILLIONS NOW LIVING WILL BE DEAD -- EXCEPT FOR KEITH RICHARDS.

And cockroaches.

Being John Ashcroft

2005-01-27T12:17:00.000-08:00

Jesus loves you, John Ashcroft. This you know, for the Bible told you so. And they hate you for it, these liberal heathens, these infidels of the media elite, these secular humanists.
You were expecting this, for it was written long ago: The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.

They mock your piety, call you Ned Flanders and worse. Racist. Homophobe. American Taliban. You pay them no mind. As per the Lord's example, you turn the other cheek.

"For every crucifixion there is a resurrection," you say.

You were born, or more accurately, begat in 1942, son of an Assemblies of God preacher man. Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and Pat Robertson are among your brothers and sisters in the Assembly of God.

In accordance with your faith, you are your own preacher. As such, you are a faith healer.

You speak in tongues. You forswear all the vices of sin and temptation: drinking, smoking, pornography, homosexuality and dancing. Yes, dancing.

You've always kept busy because idle hands are the devil's playthings. You graduated from Yale in 1964, with honors. You earned a law degree from the University of Chicago in the Summer of Love, the year of the Lord 1967. You went on to teach business law at Southwest Missouri State University, for which you were given an occupational deferment that kept you from serving in Vietnam.

It was not your calling to fight the godless communists. No, the Lord needed you right here at home, schooling God's children in the intricacies of corporate jurisprudence.

Soon you answered an even higher calling: politics. God smiled on you, John Ashcroft, and in 1976 you were narrowly elected state attorney general, a post you would hold for eight years, followed by another eight as governor and six more as a U.S. senator.

Every time you were sworn in to office, your father anointed you with cooking oil, just like David in the Bible. When you were sworn in as attorney general, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas did the honors.

Your tenure as governor of Missouri was wrought with cruel secular ironies. You were unsuccessfully sued by a fetus, whose lawyers claimed was illegally imprisoned in the uterus of a criminal mother. Which is ironic given your outspoken opposition to abortion.

Life, as you believe, may begin at conception, but apparently due process does not. You also fought a court-ordered school desegregation plan because, you said, it imposed an unfair tax burden on the citizens of Missouri.

But you were not a racist, you insisted. In fact, your daddy made sure to turn you away from prejudice by making you listen to Mahalia Jackson and read black novelist Richard Wright when you were a boy. Furthermore, your parents let black guests rake the leaves in the backyard, just as they would any white guests.

In A.D. 2000, the Lord tested you yet again, pitting you in a fight for your political life against a dead man. You were running for reelection to Congress against Mel Carnahan. There was a bitter political rivalry between you two, extending all the way back to the days when you were governor and he was lieutenant governor, and you went out of your way to clarify in the courts that you did not automatically cede gubernatorial power to him whenever you left the state.

The Senate race was as tight as it was ugly. Citing your praise of the Southern Confederacy, Carnahan's people inferred to voters that you had a problem with black people. Your people responded by circulating photos of Carnahan in blackface. And then, less than a month before the election, Carnahan died in a plane crash, along with his son and a trusted aide. The Missouri governor appointed his wife, Jean, to stand in his stead in the election.

Who could vote against a mourning widow and mother? Almost nobody. You took it like a man. Even your enemies conceded that. You did not challenge the election, even though you had numerous grounds to do so.

When your appointment as the nation's top cop squeaked by Congress in a 52-48 vote, you went on a charm offensive to cleanse yourself of the twin stains of racism and homophobia your critics painted you with, meeting with Log Cabin Republicans and speaking out forcefully against racial profiling.

And then 9/11 hit like an atom bomb, catching your unawares Department of Justice with its pants around its ankles. You acted quickly to rid the nation of the evildoers who walk among us, hiding behind the Constitution.

Your response was eerily Orwellian. Thousands were rounded up and detained, languishing in secret detentions for months, unofficially charged with the crime of being an Arab at the wrong place at the wrong time.

You refused to say who any of these people were or why they were being held. And when the press started to look into these detentions, you told your lawyers at the Department of Justice to do whatever was legally permissible to avoid complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Out of the valley of the shadow of 9/11 you emerged with the USA Patriot Act, which unshackled law enforcement from the dictates of the Fourth Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, household papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, will not be violated."

This fundamental principle of American liberty, you said in effect, was a relic from another era, like the "rotary telephone." Which is odd considering that only a few years ago, as a congressman, you wrote an impassioned defense of online privacy entitled "Keep Big Brother's Hands off the Internet."

"The Clinton administration would like the federal government to have the right to read any international or domestic computer communications," you wrote, adding, " ... the state's interest in effective crime-fighting should never vitiate the citizen's Bill of Rights." Apparently the Lord works in mysteriously partisan ways.

There has been much hue and cry over the Patriot Act. The provision that allows federal agents to monitor which books you check out of the library or purchase at the bookstore strikes most everyone as baldly un-American. More than 150 local governments--and the state legislatures of Vermont, Alaska and Hawaii--have passed resolutions condemning all or parts of the Patriot Act.

Last month the House of Representatives, that bastion of liberalism, voted 309-118 to suspend federal funding for so-called "sneak and peak" search warrants that allow government agents to slip into people's homes when they're away and rifle through their belongings and the contents of their hard drives.

That's a lot of doubting Thomases. And that's a problem as we ramp up to an election year wherein your boss will run on his strength and efficacy as the commander in chief in the War on Terror.

And so you are taking your case on the road, explaining to the American people the necessity of the Patriot Act. Curiously, it would seem that only the people in important swing states, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, need convincing.

Even more curious, these speaking appearances are not open public forums. Rather, they entail carefully chosen sympathetic audiences: the archconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute in Washington last Tuesday or a roomful of regional cop brass and prosecutors at the National Constitution Center last Wednesday.

Just 100 yards away a true American patriot, Benjamin Franklin, surely must have been rolling over in his grave at the corner of Fifth and Arch streets. He is the man, after all, who said: He who gives up essential liberty for a little temporary security deserves neither liberty nor security.